iOS Message Simulator?

[paulold]

Would it be possible to create a iPhone simulator app for my Mac Book Pro that would allow me to view the messages/texts with the Message app stored within an one of my iPhone backups stored in my iTunes?

I'm wanting to start from scratch with my iPhone which would eliminate my text/message history. I was just thinking if there was some other way to view my old messages, say with an app, then I turn to the simulator to look at the old messages if need be. (My other idea is to maintain an old phone with the history still on it.)

 

[acctman]

Not sure if I understand completely what you're trying to do. Mac's has the "Messages" app which pretty much is a duplicate / backup of your iPhone messages. You delete a message on your iPhone it's still on your Mac.

 

[paulold]

Not sure if I understand completely what you're trying to do. Mac's has the "Messages" app which pretty much is a duplicate / backup of your iPhone messages. You delete a message on your iPhone it's still on your Mac.

My text/iMessage history goes back to the days of the very first iPhone. When I get my 6S, I don't want to restore from backup since it appears there's some corruption in my backup. And I don't want to restore my extensive text history to my new phone either. I want a fresh start with my new phone. But I don't want to lose my text history completely. Keep in mind that the text forwarding to a Mac wasn't a feature until more recently, so my Mac doesn't have everything. Thus I was thinking if we had an app that could take an iPhone backup and simulate/recreate my iPhone, I could keep an old backup and use it to view my message history as needed. Or maybe someone could develop a Mac app that creates a backup of just the Messages content on an iPhone and provides a viewer. Surely I'm not the only iPhone user that has been carrying forward an extensive and ever-growing text history.

 

[abhibeckert]

You can use iExplorer to view messages stored in a backup of your phone, and also export them as txt/csv/pdf which would make them available in spotlight searches on your mac.

If you don't want to pay, the data is stored in an sqlite database somewhere - my backups are encrypted however, and I'm not sure how to decrypt them to access the actual data.

iMessage on OS X also uses SQLite for it's database, and it's probably almost identical... this means it should be possible to write a shell script that copies all the messages in a backup of your phone over to iMessage on your Mac.