Open Radar

 
MSMessage has a shouldExpire property. While this is not very well documented (see radar 27224359), a Messages extension should be able to define a custom condition upon which a message is considered to be eligible for expiration.

Our app (Confide) is a secure, confidential, ephemeral, screenshot-protected messaging app. We are planning on building a Messages extension to allow users to send ephemeral and screenshot-protected messages from within the Messages app.

We envision this working by sending MSMessages with a preview UIImage in the chat bubble layout and the actual message content encoded in the URL. When a user receives a message, they'll tap the chat bubble and our UI will expand and our app will control how the message is presented to the user.

We would like to be able to ensure that a chat bubble lives in the transcript until the user taps on it and reads the message in our UI, at which point our app should be able to tell iOS that the message is eligible to expire (it would be even better if we could force expiration, but that seems less likely to happen).