I upgraded from an iPhone 14 Pro to an iPhone 18 Pro yesterday and transferred everything directly from the old phone. My conversations are visible on the new device, including texts I received and sent shortly before switching, but Message search no longer finds words from those older texts. I rely heavily on searching past conversations for work, so this is a serious problem. Could the new phone still be indexing the transferred messages, and how long should that normally take?
2 Answers
A phone-to-phone transfer can leave Messages needing time to finish syncing and rebuilding its search index. Give it several days—possibly up to a week—while keeping the phone connected to power and Wi-Fi. If older messages still don’t appear in search after that, contacting Apple Support would be the next step.
Check whether the phone shows an indexing or search-improvement notice near the top of Settings. If there’s no notice and search still doesn’t work after waiting until tomorrow, try restarting the phone and checking again.
Thanks! I usually start fresh instead of transferring everything, so I didn’t realize indexing could take that long.