Apple’s Mistake Makes Suing Your Husband Not Completely Crazy

Remember that cheating husband who sent text messages to sex workers, deleted them, and then got divorce papers when his wife found the supposedly “deleted” messages? He’s suing Apple for the £5 million it cost him to get divorced, according to the Times.

Interestingly, while he is clearly unfaithful, unethical, and perhaps even the scum of the earth to those he has scammed, he may not be completely crazy. Here’s why: Apple has had an iMessage bug for years that has affected me personally, and it is directly related to messages that Apple says will be deleted “across all devices,” but clearly that is not the case.

Here’s how it works.

If you have multiple Apple devices, such as a Mac, iPad, and iPhone, you can set up iMessage to receive all your text messages in all of those places. Apple shows you how to do this in this user guide , and it’s really handy because now you can send text messages much faster by typing on a full keyboard, rather than a virtual on-screen keyboard on your phone’s tiny screen.

But there’s a problem: duplicate messages. iMessage solves this in part by showing messages as read on all devices if you’ve read them on one, but in this day and age of SMS spam and “smishing,” many of us get random text messages from people we don’t know. Or we get two-factor authentication messages from online accounts. All of this clutters up our message history, and it would be nice to be able to get rid of it.

Luckily, Apple has thought of this, and it’s called “Delete from All Devices.” The idea: Delete from one place — your phone, for example — and the corresponding message or message string will be deleted from your Mac and iPad as well.

The problem is that it doesn’t work. This is a known bug, with many reports on the Apple support forums.

“My incoming iMessages sync fine across all my Apple devices (iPhone and iMac), but when I delete a message on my Mac, it doesn’t get deleted on any other Apple devices,” says Apple forum user FrankBear.

“Deleting a message on iPhone doesn’t delete it on macOS and vice versa,” BillT says in another. “It worked fine until the last update. I tried all the suggestions to sync them. None worked. Help!”

But it hasn’t worked for me in years, across multiple devices and multiple OS updates on iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks. Proof: the screenshot at the top of this post is from the Messages app on my Mac, showing a two-factor authentication update from some online account. The sender ID is “28849.”

And here’s the same message from the same sender, deleted from my Mac, still there on my iPhone 30 minutes later. (And will continue to be there until I manually delete it.) I’ve experienced this myself for years.

This means that if you send messages that you want to keep private, but others have access to your devices, it can be difficult to maintain privacy. And it’s entirely possible that you could delete messages and think they’re gone everywhere, when in fact they’re still showing up on all your other devices.

So while cheating on your spouse is unethical (and we can probably all agree that the consequences of such behavior and the subsequent divorce are entirely the fault of the cheating husband), Apple may face some legal liability for promising to delete data from all devices but actually failing to do so.

I have reached out to Apple for comment on the matter and will update this article if the company receives it.