I have a sincere question closely related to this thread. At what point in time did smartphone users start assuming and expecting that SMS or iMessages would be permanently stored, like email?
I'll admit that I'm an 30+ year technology professional and therefore rarely see technology from the same viewpoint as the younger crowd. However, I have always considered iMessages and SMS messages as only effective for short and ephemeral communication. Never, ever, have I cared that the iMessage that I sent or received even a day ago persisted into next week or across devices. I have always assumed that it was my responsibility to take any included information such as a photo, contact information, or address and save that information to the appropriate storage such as my contacts or Photo library.
A great concern of mine is that I frequently observe that the vast majority of current technology users (young and old) naively accept that it's fine to just assume that technology is handling their data and that they have no care or responsibility whatsoever to maintain, organize, archive, or backup their information. And, it's not just iMessage. It troubles me greatly the number of times that I have attempted to provide support to someone that has misplaced a file and I struggle to assist them when the answer to my question of "where do you think you saved the file", is, "on my computer" or "on my phone". Unfortunately, I think that that many of the same users consider SMS/iMessage to be a communication method that is permanent in nature.
It seems, from my perspective, that the majority of today's technology users simply lack the care or patience to understand the appropriate and most effective use of the diverse communication and storage technologies that they use every day. So, maybe we need someone to set up a poll. I honestly want to know what percentage of current iMessage users expect their messages to be available/preserved forever, just like email.
