I have been having some issues with Messages in the Cloud on my Macs — both show less texts and iMessages than my iPhone and iPad. I guess I could go through Apple Support but their software solutions usually are to log out and log back in to iCloud or to start fresh (seriously). Instead, I spent a few hours pruning old conversations, which I didn’t need anymore. This still didn’t solve the issue of the multi-year threads that I have with my wife — I have three of those on my iOS devices and only one on my Macs. Since Messages only loads a page or two of messages at a time and requires the user to constantly scroll up to load older messages, its close to impossible to get to the beginning of the thread anyway (I don’t have the patience to scroll-wait-scroll for hours). This led me to the decision to just export our message history as a txt or PDF file and then clear Messages.
Apple Working to Replace Messages App on Mac With a Catalyst Version →
Filipe Espósito, for 9to5Mac:
[…] we have found evidence that Apple is working to completely replace the Messages app on macOS with a Catalyst version, based on iOS 14 code.
I assume this will mean the end of AppleScript support for Messages. I don’t use it, so I won’t miss it, but a lot of people will be sad to see it gone. I am however hoping that it will still be possible to navigate Messages by using just the keyboard, which I do right now — ⌃⭾ moves me down the list and ⌃⇧⭾ reverses direction. Since the move Catalyst is to get feature parity between platforms, I hope they add keyboard shortcuts for stickers, tapbacks, and other features. Tapbacks are currently possible but require using the trackpad or mouse:
Send a Tapback: Click and hold a message, then choose a Tapback. If your Mac has a Touch Bar, you can also click a message, then tap a Tapback in the Touch Bar.