A British man is ridiculously attempting to sue Apple following a divorce, caused by his wife finding messages to a prostitute he deleted from his iPhone that were still accessible on an iMac.
In the last years of his marriage, a man referred to as “Richard” started to use the services of prostitutes, without his wife’s knowledge. To try and keep the communications secret, he used iMessages on his iPhone, but then deleted the messages.
Despite being careful on his iPhone to cover his tracks, he didn’t count on Apple’s ecosystem automatically synchronizing his messaging history with the family iMac. Apparently, he wasn’t careful enough to use Family Sharing for iCloud, or discrete user accounts on the Mac.
The Times reports the wife saw the message when she opened iMessage on the iMac. She also saw years of messages to prostitutes, revealing a long period of infidelity by her husband.
Good question. It should sync deletes per their support article, and that’s my experience with iMessages. Wonder if this was an SMS conversation and it only delivers to multiple devices, but doesn’t actually sync SMS like it does iMessages.
Technically that doesn’t say that deleting them from your phone will delete it from the backup on your Mac
And it would definitely be SMS if the prostitutes were using Android.
SMS forwards and syncs through the Messages app if you enable it in iCloud. If he was getting the “Sign into iCloud” prompt to reauthenticate his Mac any point in time after the message was synced, and they were just hitting cancel, it would suspend sync and deletion.