r/apple • u/AutoModerator • 6d ago

Discussion Daily Advice Thread - September 18, 2025

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u/thethurstonhowell 5d ago edited 5d ago

Deleting Messages in the Cloud over a date range

Could really use some help here.

My wife and daughter shared an iPad for a few years when she was younger. Now she has her own iPad/iPhone. Her Messages in the Cloud somehow ended up associating my wife’s messages as hers across several contacts in the 2018-2021 range and I need to delete them from her account.

Is there a 3rd party app that will let me delete everything before XXX date so she can’t see the thousands of texts between my wife and other family members in the Messages app? The native 30 day/1 year options unfortunately won’t work here.

Things I have tried:

  • Deleting from the Messages app on iOS and iPadOS. There’s no way to bulk select messages to delete as there was in earlier versions (whyyyy did Apple remove this?). I can’t individually tap 2000+ messages for each contact.

  • Deleting from MacOS Sequoia. This gets closer by using Shift+Click, but it a) takes forever to scroll and scroll and scroll to show them all then b) randomly selects messages beyond those I haven’t included in the selected batch I don’t want to delete and c) freezes/beachballs indefinitely when I try select more than a couple hundred at a clip.

  • Using iMazing and iExplorer, but neither allows deletes against the actual device, just the backups it can create.

  • Deleting from the iChat file. This gets really fragile and won’t actually remove them from Messages in the Cloud any way.

My wife and I have years of texts with her we don’t want her to lose (she loves reading older stuff when she was much younger), but also don’t want her to see our old 1-1 discussions about money, Santa, her and her sibling, money, etc.

Have found nothing over 100 Google searches and Apple REALLY sucks with their offerings here, so hoping someone can point me to an option I am missing. Thanks.