Load Earlier Messages button in the Messages app

By Robert Spangler, 28 November, 2014

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

In earlier versions of iOS, I could use the "Load Earlier Messages" button to see older messages in a messages thread. This button no longer seems to be present in iOS 8.x. What is the new method for obtaining message histories?

I have an iPhone 6 Plus with iOS 8.1.1.

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Comments

By Mike Fulton on Friday, February 6, 2015 - 00:44

Has anyone been able to figure this out?

By Robert Spangler on Friday, March 6, 2015 - 00:44

Hello:

I emailed Apple Accessibility about this; their response is below:
Thank you for your email. Older messages should be loaded automatically as you scroll through the message history. There is a setting which affects how long messages are saved. If you are missing older messages, we encourage you to check this setting. It can be found at Settings > Messages > Keep Messages. The available options are 30 days, 1 year, and forever.

So, I'm assuming when they say scroll through the messages, they mean scrolling through the pages with three finger swipe up and down. I know for a fact this doesn't work because I have several conversations that are months old and they have something like only four, five pages. will keep you all posted on what I hear further from Apple.

Robert

By John Lipsey on Friday, March 6, 2015 - 00:44

The 3-finger swipe to scroll works for me. You have to swipe down with 3 fingers until you get to page 1 of however many. Then, tap the middle left side of the screen, roughly. After that, it allows you to scroll down some more, and the number of pages it scrolls through changes.
HTH.

So are you saying to double tap the left side of the screen? This doesn't work for me. Typical Apple just making things more challenging for us. *sigh*

This inability to load earlier messages seems to only occur when VoiceOver is active. Until Apple fixes the problem, you can see older messages by deactivating VoiceOver (triple-press home button if you've set this up in accessibility settings), scrolling up (repeated one finger downward swipe), and reactivating VoiceOver (triple-press home again).