iphone's SMS quota ... wtf?

[brad]

Everytime I use the SMS app on my iphone, I get a stupid little pop-up which says:Your SMS mailbox is almost full. Please delete some messages.

[OK]
Except for one thing.... I have 6.96 GB of free space!And now I find out it's been silently dropping incoming text messages, even though new outgoing ones I write go into my history, which made me

Comments

[chris]

i'm sure it's some arbitrary limit that has nothing to do with free space. whats screwy is that it's dropping them. I hit my limit all the time on my phone but the new msgs queue up server side and get delivered later.

[brad]

Yeah, I just deleted a bunch and then they started flowing in. Damn, and they're still flowing in.

Still, I don't buy any "arbitrary limit" argument. Maybe if that limit were 4.2 billion texts I'd go, "Ahh, how cute... Apple used a 32 bit int for their SMS ids on the phone.... okay, that's a reasonable assumption." But anything else? No. Incompetence.

[brad]

char sms_buffer[160*1000];

Wonderful.

[ydna]

Cute. I clicked the, "No, this article did not solve my problem," link and offered the following feedback:
It would have been much more helpful if this article said, "Yes, we realize that only allocating storage for 1,000 SMS messages on a device that can store gigabytes of data (email, music, videos, oh my) was a bit short sighted. But we're hard at work correcting the problem in an upcoming firmware upgrade that will allow you to use your SMS mailbox just like you use the mail application or iPod functions of your iPhone."

Not that Apple will give a shit.

[nbarkas]

They probably use different memory than the main flash of the phone for SMS. Every phone I've used has been like this. My last Sony Ericsson phone would run out of space for new texts even if my 2GB memory stick had nothing on it. Some phones just store all the SMS messages on the SIM card only. Old Sidekicks were this way, and could only store 30 messages at a time!

Why this limitation exists though, I have no idea. Especially on an iPhone, where they have gigabytes of fixed storage that is never going to be removed.

[brad]

Perhaps the SMS functionality runs on the radio chipset, independent of the phone's operating system, thus needs its own dedicated chunk of memory.

But even if that were the case, obviously the iPhone's operating system can still access that chunk of memory (otherwise we couldn't see SMSes we got, or delete them), so then the question would be why Apple didn't implement some async copy-from-SMS-storage-to-main-storage thread, cleaning up the limited 160k buffer. I'd also like to sync my SMSes to my computer, which I don't think you can do right now.

[ydna]

The SMS messages are synced to the computer. But only for the purpose of backing up the data. When you do a restore, all that data goes back onto the iPhone. If not, then the claim that the restore resets the device to factory condition would be a lie. Apple wouldn't lie to me. Would they?

[supersat]

I think that's the most likely explaination. My Sidekick (and many other phones) store SMS messages on the SIM card, which is supposedly the "right" thing to do since it allows you to access them on any phone. I'm guessing the iPhone's radio module writes the messages directly to the SIM card, and drops them if there isn't sufficient space. You could always pop your SIM into another phone and see if this is the case (assuming the other phone also uses the SIM card for SMS).

It would be nice if Apple offered an option to archive old SMS messages on the phone itself, and leave only the most recent messages (plus some free space) on the SIM.

[derleiermann]

SMS messages are stored in the system partition in a sqlite db file called sms.db

The system partition is around 300Mb, with the 1.1.1 software there's not too much free space, but still... it's kinda weird since being text messages and everything it should have plenty of space.

Oh yes, iPhone SMS system drops SMS in which the ID of the incoming sender is a text instead of a phone number, in 1.1.1 the situation is a bit fixed but it still has lots of bugs, hope they fix this soon!

[loic]

Perhaps they're just using the storage on the SIM. We used that plus main phone flash on the hiptop/Sidekick so we had a slightly higher low arbitrary limit.