Is your smartphone taking too long to load your text messaging app? Does your SMS app start to stutter when you scroll up or down your message list? Is your phone’s memory almost full and you need to clear out some digital clutter? If you answered yes to these questions, then you should consider automatically deleting text messages.
Most of us receive too many text messages to manually delete each one. On our first Nokia feature phone, most phones can only store a little over 100 messages, so we keep a close eye on all incoming messages. But these days, storage limitations seem to have disappeared, and information is starting to pile up on everyone’s phone. This led to another set of problems – messaging app sluggishness and storage issues. Reducing clutter is actually quite simple – you can set your phone to automatically delete old messages. That’s it.
iPhone
On iPhone, you can set the device to automatically delete all old messages. The only problem is that you can’t make any exceptions – you can’t change the setting that allows all messages from a specific sender to remain even after the expiration date. If you want to save any information from your messages, we recommend keeping the clippings in an application like Evernote. To set up automatic purging of old messages, you can do the following:
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Open Settings > Messages.
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Scroll down to the marked section Message history.
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tap keep message.
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choose one 30 days or 1 year. This will delete messages older than a month or a year.
Android
Android can be a little more complicated than iPhone, simply because there are so many variations available. The Android version will come into play as well as the custom features that come with the smartphone. However, Google’s Hangouts app can now become your default messaging client, and it allows you to automatically delete old messages,
To use Hangouts as an SMS client (if you’re not already using it), you need to do the following:
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Open the default messaging app – Hangouts.
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Click on the three horizontal lines icon in the upper left corner.
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tap set up.
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tap Short message.
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tap SMS is disabled Then click OK. This may take a few seconds to complete after you click OK.
Now, to automatically delete messages from Hangouts:
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scroll down to advanced part.
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Check Delete old messages. This will delete old text messages from the phone when memory is low.
While this is useful, some Android manufacturers also allow you to save individual messages. This doesn’t apply to the Moto E, Micromax Canvas 2, or Gionee Elife E5, but it does to the LG G3, so your situation may vary. Here, we used the manufacturer’s SMS app. Here’s how to save messages and delete old messages:
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Open Short message app.
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Click the three dot button in the upper right corner.
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Go to Settings > Storage.
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Check “Delete old messages” and set a limit on the number of messages each conversation can have in the drop-down menu below.
If you want to prevent old messages from being automatically deleted, long press on a specific message in the conversation and tap Copy to saved box.
Unfortunately, not all phones have this feature by default, so you’ll need to experiment with your device to see if this option is available. Automatically deleting old messages is obviously useful, but it could also use some advanced tweaks to make it even better on iOS and Android. If you use any other method to automatically delete old text messages, please let us know in the comments. For more tutorials, visit our how-to section.