Apple Messages: a tale of woe OR how to fix sync, a crash loop and accept data loss
Apple's Messages app recently started crashing in a loop on my Mac Mini — it would happen every time the app was opened after a 5-10 second delay. Deleting conversations from other devices and letting that change sync over didn't appear to help.
Apple's Messages app recently started crashing in a loop on my Mac Mini — it would happen every time the app was opened after a 5-10 second delay. Deleting conversations from other devices and letting that change sync over didn't appear to help.
If you're attached to your message history and have a device where Messages.app isn't crashing, I'd suggest backing up your messages before you try fixing this. Done? Here we go:
Navigate to ~/Library and delete:
Messages
Caches/com.apple.Messages
Caches/com.apple.imfoundation.IMRemoteURLConnectionAgent
Caches/com.apple.MobileSMS
Containers/com.apple.iChat
Containers/com.apple.soagent
Log out of/deactivate iMessage on all of your devices. Reboot them. Log back in and hope for the best[1].
They should start syncing again, but it may take a while and the conversations downloaded from iCloud may be a bit disjointed, but the app should stop crashing and work going forward. ↩︎
