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Automatic offloading impedes adoption of iMessage alternatives

Note

In the US, iMessage has become pervasive and obligatory within many social groups. Because SMS was popular before the introduction of iMessage and iMessage is embedded in Messages, the default messaging application on iPhone, it is widely used among majority-iPhone social circles in the US.

It isn’t easy to adopt alternatives. It’s not just a matter of choosing a different app; members of your social group must also adopt that messaging app. OS design can significantly affect adoption and sometimes prevent it entirely.

I’ve been trying to embrace Telegram instead of Messages. Not many people I know use Telegram, so there are sometimes months-long gaps in my use of the app. A few weeks ago, I realized I hadn’t talked to one of my friends for a while. When I went to open the app, I was surprised to see that iOS had offloaded Telegram! When downloading finished, I noticed I had missed a few messages. :(

What is offloading?

iOS has a storage-saving feature that is supposed to offload “unused” apps. But something is off about how it picks apps to offload. It will sometimes uninstall frequently used apps. [1] There is no way to tell iOS to keep certain apps; either automatic offloading is enabled for all apps [2] or it is not.

Apple recommends enabling this feature in the Settings app. It’s not some super-secret setting reserved for power users. iOS sends push notifications when the device has high storage utilization, so even ordinary users get the automatic-storage-offloading recommendation whenever they reach the storage-low watermark.

iPhone Storage. iPhone. 75.95 gigabytes of 256 gigabytes used. Applications: 35.85 gigabytes. Photos: 11.1 gigabytes. Messages: 7.77 gigabytes. iOS: 11.16 gigabytes. System Data: 9.69 gigabytes. Available: 180.1 gigabytes. Recommendations. Save up to 6 gigabytes. See photos, videos, and attachments taking up storage in Messages and consider deleting them. Offload Unused Apps. Save up to 382.2 megabytes. Automatically offload unused apps when you're low on storage. Your documents & data will be saved.

What’s not accessible is details of how automatic offloading works. Apple doesn’t provide official documentation detailing how automatic offloading selects apps. Any information about automatic offloading beyond a basic description comes from Apple Community members’ conjecture.

Unholy messaging apps (i.e., not Messages) are subject to being offloaded. Developers have asked the Apple Developer Forums if there is an entitlement or something else that can prevent offloading. The answer is apparently no. This is an obstacle for infrequently used apps. Telling users to refrain from enabling automatic offloading is not a solution since iOS nags users to enable it whenever they reach the high storage usage threshold. Users will be advised to enable automatic offloading every time they reach the threshold, but a reminder to disable the feature can only be shown to the user when they first install an app and randomly on subsequent launches. Even then, this isn’t much of a solution for infrequently used apps. It might get offloaded before it even has a chance to remind the user to keep the feature disabled!

But Apple offloads its flagship apps!

Correction: it offloads some of its flagship apps. The Messages app is exempt from being offloaded; it gets special privileges as a system app. Nothing is inherently wrong with this, except that iOS doesn’t provide an interface to also exempt third-party apps.

But that’s because it would be silly to offload the SMS app!

Right. It’s the iPhone’s exclusive SMS app, which is tied to the iMessage protocol. This convenient (for Apple) oversight [3] always gives Messages and, by extension, iMessage priority over any other messaging app.

Now my “choice” to “just use a different messaging app” comes with an additional burden: I must constantly check Telegram to ensure it doesn’t get offloaded. I never have to worry about that with Messages. Messages’s exemption from offloading means that I can trust that an absence of notifications means I haven’t received any messages.

Whether intentional or not, this preferential treatment of Apple’s flagship messaging app against third-party messaging apps frustrates adopting alternatives. Adopting a new messaging app is transitional [4] exacerbating this frustration. This artificial unreliability imposed on other messaging apps makes iMessage seem more reliable to the end user, reinforcing iMessage as their preferred messaging protocol.

Those messages I missed because Telegram got offloaded could have changed my opinion about Telegram’s reliability. My contact could have been an acquaintance who felt I had intentionally ignored them. I may have unwittingly pushed my contact to get an iPhone because they recognized that it would be less likely they’d be ignored using iMessage.

Just disable offloading 🙄

It’s not that simple. Recall that iOS nags [5] users about reaching the high-storage watermark. Instead of “simply” disabling offloading, one has to not enable offloading every time they get a high-storage nag notification. Less savvy users will have difficulty remembering to do the opposite of what iOS recommends. Low-income folks are also affected more severely: less money means buying a cheaper iPhone, which means lower storage, which means more low-storage nag notifications.

Whether Apple intended to or not, it has created a choice between two degraded experiences for those who want to use an alternative messaging app:

  1. Disable automatic offloading to avoid the messaging app from getting offloaded, but experience the inconvenience of manually offloading apps.

  2. Accept that iOS may automatically offload the messaging app, causing missed messages.

Messages users face no such degradation because, again, iOS will not offload the app. If I don’t want to use Messages, I get a worse experience, not because Telegram is inferior, but because Apple is, at best, neglecting to fix the problem with offloading. [1]

If Apple cares about good UX and giving its users what they want, it should provide a UI to toggle which apps to exempt from offloading. Apple has the resources to implement this. It already has code to exempt apps from offloading, already has code to enumerate the applications installed on the iPhone, and some of the best developers in the world.

No one should have to disable useful OS features simply because they’re using the “wrong” apps. Third-party applications should be able to compete against first-party apps on their merits. If Messages is the better app, then this won’t make much of a difference in messaging-app market share, but it will be a welcome change for users who want more control over automatic offloading.

  1. My iPhone offloaded app which I use every day - Apple Community (2018, archived) I’ve also had the offloading feature offload the Pocket Casts app, but not Apple Podcasts even though I have only ever used Pocket Casts. This misdesign clearly hasn’t been fixed despite users bringing it to Apple’s attention in 2018. ↩↩

  2. Except the flagship apps Apple has carved out an exception for. ↩

  3. Is it really an oversight? ↩

  4. Getting everyone in your social network to suddenly switch to a new messaging app is not feasible. It’s a slow process that requires convincing each contact to use something other than the Messages app. ↩

  5. No, I don’t want Apple to disable the push notifications about high-storage usage. I want them to do what I’m proposing in this article – make it so we can disable offloading for specific apps. ↩