When Apple announced iOS 11, one feature mentioned was “Messages in iCloud,” which promised to keep your iMessages in sync and backed up to iCloud for easy restore onto a new device. It’s not a headlining feature, but one that would make life with iOS devices a little bit nicer.
Looks like the feature was pulled from today’s iOS 11 beta release:
The “Messages in iCloud” feature has been removed in iOS 11 beta 5 and will ship in a future software update to iOS 11. Users can continue to receive and store messages on each device, and they can continue to backup and restore messages using iCloud Backup.
I agree with Jason Snell that it sounds like this is coming later, as part of a later update to iOS 11. While that’s a bummer, this is important to get right, so I’m fine with it.
While we’re on the topic of iOS 11, I’ve been running the public beta on my 10.5″ iPad Pro and it’s been really nice. When today’s release ends up in the public beta channel, I may sacrifice my iPhone to it as well.