You just know if they do this it'll be the next thing the UK government complains about... "Paedophiles and criminals could use this to communicate!!1!"
On a semi-serious point, my gut says the reason it hasn't been added is because there's no good way to guarantee or attest the message isn't unrecoverable by the receiver. Product-wise that's a hard sell, even if close enough is good enough.
I remember hearing similar objections when Signal implemented disappearing messages. I’m glad the pragmatists won, correctly (IMO) arguing that the feature is to encourage good hygiene rather than enforce security against a malicious communication partner.
It's great that I don't have to worry about the questionable ideas conversation partners have about their phones' security and software updates, since in a month our messages are automatically deleted from each other's phones.
what they really need to do (as well) is encrypt iMessage backups. It's not end-to-end encrypted if Apple can just read your iMessage backup (unless you have Advanced Data Protection enabled)
You can do whatever you like with your messages—don’t back them up, use Advanced Data Protection—but you have no control over the backup policies of the people you’re communicating with. So your messages might end up in someone else’s backup.
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First of all, how dare you remind us it was a decade ago.