Apple Bug Makes Cheating Husband’s Lawsuit Not Totally Insane

Remember that cheating husband who texted sex workers, deleted them, but then got a divorce petition when his wife discovered the supposedly “deleted” messages? He’s suing Apple for the £5 million the divorce cost him, according to The Times.

Interestingly, while he is clearly unfaithful, unethical, and perhaps even the scum of the earth to those who have been cheated on, he may not be completely crazy. Here’s why: Apple has had an iMessage bug for years that has affected me personally and is directly related to messages that Apple tells you will be deleted “on all your devices,” but clearly aren’t.

Here’s how it works.

If you have multiple Apple devices, like 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 helpful because you can now send text messages much faster by typing on a full keyboard, rather than an on-screen keyboard on your phone’s small display.

But there’s a problem: message duplication. iMessage partially solves this problem by showing messages as read on all devices if you’ve read them on one of them. But in the 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 internet accounts. All of this clutters up our message history, and it would be nice to be able to get rid of it.

Luckily, Apple thought of this and called this option “Delete from All Your Devices.” The concept: Delete a message in one place (your phone, for example) and the message or message chain in question will also be deleted on your Mac and iPad.

The problem is that it doesn’t work. This is a known bug with multiple reports on Apple’s help forums.

“My incoming iMessages sync fine across all my Apple devices (iPhone and iMac), but when I delete a message on my Mac, it is not deleted on any other Apple device,” explains Apple forum user FrankBear.

“Deleting a message on iPhone doesn’t work on MacOS and vice versa,” BillT explains in another post. “It was working fine until the recent update. I tried all the suggestions to sync them. None of them worked. Help!”

For me, however, it hasn’t worked for years, across multiple devices and multiple operating system updates on iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks. Proof: The screenshot at the top of this article is from the Messages app on my Mac, and shows a two-factor authentication update from an online account. The sender ID is “28849.”

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

This means that if you send messages that you want to keep private, but other people have access to your devices, it’s pretty hard to stay private. And it’s entirely possible that you delete messages and think they’re deleted everywhere, when in fact they’re still showing up on all your other devices.

So while it’s unethical to cheat on your spouse, and we can probably all agree that the consequences of that behavior and the resulting divorce are entirely the fault of the cheating husband, it could still mean that Apple could face some legal liability for promising to remove it from all devices but failing to do so.

I’ve asked Apple for a comment on this and will update this article if the company provides one.