A new Apple feature sinks your text messages across various devices, and it can free up some precious storage space on your iPhone. What's going on, I'm Rich Demiro. This is Rich on Tech Daily. Apple has released iOS eleven point four, which has several new features, but one in particular could make managing your text messages easier, especially if you have multiple Apple devices. As a bonus, it can help you free up some space consumed by your messages. The new
feature is called Messages in iCloud. And here's the thing. It was announced last year at WWDC. Now we're coming up to this year's WWDC and the feature was just launched. But I guess Apple wanted to get it right. So you might be thinking, wait a second, didn't iCloud always store my messages? Well, kind of sort of. Yes, No, it was really a mixed bag. Historically, when you would back up messages using iCloud, you were really getting only half the story. Messages were backed up based on the
device that you were backing up to iCloud. If you did a restore, you would get your messages back, but only the messages that were on that device, and they were never truly synced across devices. This means that if you deleted a text on one device, it might still show up on another device. Now, with messages in iCloud, once you turn on the future, you can manage your messages kind of like you manage webmail. They'll be on all your devices. When you delete one place, it'll be
gone from another place. If you send a response from one device, that response will be reflected on the other device. Now, before I explain how to turn it on, let me tell you some of the other benefits. One of the big ones is that since your messages are now stored in iCloud, this can save you storage space on your phone. So before all of your I messages were sort of in this giant backup, which included the photos and attachments and older messages that you had. All of that was
in a giant messages backup. Well, now a lot of that is going to be offloaded to eye. Only a portion of your messages will actually be stored on your phone. The rest will all kind of be on demand. When you need something, you tap it and your iPhone will pull it off the cloud and deliver it to you instantly. That means your nightly backups will also be faster since you're not backing up a giant messages backup. It's just a backup of the local messages that are on your phone.
I know that's kind of a small delineation, but it is there and it will impact your nightly backups. And finally, when you get a new device, it's all going to be restored with all of your messages, not just whatever you had lingering on the device that you're restored from. So basically, in a word, this is going to be really cool because finally you now keep track of all your texts, no matter where you send or receive them from, and they will all be in one nice, nicely organized backup.
So how do you set it up? Well, first off, you need to have the latest version of iOS installed. This is iOS eleven point four, so go to your iPhone settings and download that. Once it's installed, you go into iCloud and all you have to do is turn on the toggle for messages and that will basically turn on messages back up in iCloud. If you don't have two factor authentication turned on, Apple's gonna ask you to turn that on before it will allow you to sync
your messages and there's a reason for that. Messages often contain highly sensitive information. There's a lot of personal stuff in there. Apple wants to make sure that your account is as secure as possible before it goes mixing and sending your messages between all these accounts. But keep in mind they are encrypted end to end, so they are pretty secure. So what does it mean when you have
two factor authentication turn on? Basically, every time you sign in using your Apple ID, whether it's on a new device or on the web, you're going to get a notification or a text message with a code. You have to enter that secondary code after your password in order for the login to proceed. It's a little bit of a hassle, but it is well worth the added layer of security. So I just turned the messages in iCloud on on my iPhone and I'm gonna turn it on
on my iPad. But on my Mac computer the feature is not available just yet. You have to have a software update to ten point thirteen point five for your mac os. Right now, I'm running ten point thirteen point four, so I can't say that it works perfectly just yet. But I am very excited about all this because I never really understood in the past what was going on with my messages. Sometimes they'd arrived to my Mac, sometimes they'd derive to my phone, sometimes they'd be on both.
I never really understood. And now finally everything will be in sync. Now there is one flip side to all of this, because you're storing all of your messages in the cloud, this will take up even more iCloud storage, So keep that in mind. If you're in that five gigabyte free tier, it's gonna be pretty tight in there between your photos and your messages, so you're probably gonna have to upgrade pay that extra buck a month like I do for fifty gigs. I think that's quite the deal.
I also think the benefit of having all my messages SYNCD across all my device is a really awesome feature. All right, thanks so much for listening. If you like this podcast, please rate and review it in the Apple Podcast Step. I really appreciate that because then more people discover it. And if you want to see my step by step tutorial for turning on the new messages in iCloud feature, which by the way, again works with both your I messages and your text messages, just go to
my website richon tech dot TV. Until next time, I'm Rich Demiro. I'll talk to you real soon.