Fleeting messages prototype

Today I built a quick prototype !

As a heavy WhatsApp user who often sends one-time texts and images (just silly things meant to be viewed only once by my closest friends) I decided to move some of my conversations to Apple Messages.

Soon I realized that there is no such feature there. Sure, there is an option to auto-delete messages after 30 days but that doesn’t really cut it.

So, after a quick search without finding any other existing solutions, it was time to open Xcode and see if there is an API that can allow me to implement this task. Turns out the somewhat neglected Messages Extensions SDK was the anser.

The GenAI features newly added to Xcode proved very helpful to bootstrap the proof of concept, especially with the boilerplate parts that are highly frequent in mobile development. That said, I’m afraid that the AI help stops here as tech debt would start to pile up way too fast.

The fleeting texts feature works like a charm but when expanding to images things start to break, I’d like to only rely on MSMessage (Apple build-in way of encoding messages) but it has a max limit which of course is not clearly documented but is lower than any amount that would make possible compressing a photo into it. I’m thinking of bypassing this limitation by using an external server to temporarily host the sent photo for only one access. These adds some complications as I need to ensure privacy and security, but is still doable.