iPhone Downloading Messages from iCloud...

[AbSoluTc]

Never in my life have I had something fail so hard. Love Apple but this is a terrible thing so far. Enabled iCloud Messages. iPhone has been "downloading" since it was turned on. Update my Mac to 10.13.5 and turn it on there, no issue. The progress bar actually moves and uploads/downloads my messages. My Mac seems to be the ONLY thing that is getting all messages.

With iCloud messages on, on my phone - sometimes it shows as SMS and switches back to iMessage. My attachments for older messages have not downloaded, only a blank bubble. Recently as of early this morning, all messages are appearing on my Mac but not on my phone.

Decided to swap back to my old iPhone X and do a restore from iCloud to see what happens. Half my messages are missing. Most are way out of order conversation wise and I STILL have "Downloading Messages from iCloud...".

What the actual F! This is the stuff that really aggravates me to no end. I should NOT have turned this on but I trusted Apple.

There is no clear documentation on how this works. None. I want to know if there is a way to delete the messages from the cloud and have them re-uploaded from my Mac and synced back to my phone so that everything is how it should be. Is that even possible? I have conversations from people no longer among the living that mean a lot to me. I do NOT want to lose them.

 

[Frankfurt]

Not working for me either.

 

[AbSoluTc]

The things I have tried...

• Wiped phone, setup as new. Messages/attachments still incomplete.
• Turned off iCloud Messages on all devices and deleted messages in the cloud.
• Turned on Mac iCloud messages.
• Restored iPhone from backup.
• Turned of iCloud messages.
• Deleted all messages off phone.
• Turned iCloud messages back on.
• Phone is downloading messages.

Currently still showing, "Downloading iCloud Messages..." with grey bar.

Sigh.

Talked to Apple tech support twice. They are at a loss other than other people have called with similar issues. They want the engineering team to get some data from my phone to see what the issue is.

Messages attachments are missing, large swaths of them. Also, there seems to be a month and a half or more missing from messages.

Infuriating!

 

[Peepo]

I still have issues with my iPad Pro not pulling old messages which were uploaded from my MacBook when I enabled messsages in cloud. My iPhone X and iPad mini 4 downloaded them fined. Previously I had wiped all previous messages and started with clean slate and my iPad was syncing fine. When macos update came out I saw as opportunity to restore my old messages. I had my iPad Pro plugged in in wifi for past 24 hours and there is no indications or status it is doing any downloading of messages. Big fail.

 

[flyinmac]

Pretty much what I was expecting. At least Apple has become consistent. Unfortunately not the right kind of consistency.

 

[Peepo]

Ok update. My iPad Pro seems to have downloaded all messages from iCloud after leaving it plugged in for last couple days. There was absolutely no status bar or indication I saw at anytime that it was doing this. It does not download pictures by default but can tap to download select the i in top right and download them all per conversation.