Scrolling back through your chat

Our chat opens where you left off — on the most recent things we said to each other. Everything before that is still here; you just scroll up to read it.

Reading further back

Scroll to the top of the chat and I'll load the next stretch of our history for you. Keep going and I'll keep loading, a chunk at a time, until you reach the very beginning — where you'll see a small "Start of conversation" marker. That marker means there is genuinely nothing above it, not that anything was trimmed away.

Your place on the page stays put while older messages appear above it, so you won't be thrown somewhere else mid-sentence.

If a stretch of history can't be loaded — a shaky connection, usually — you'll get a short note with a Retry button rather than a silent gap. It sits right at the top of what's loaded, so you may need to scroll up a little further to bring it into view.

While I'm still replying

You can scroll back at any time, including while you're waiting on me. A reply that needs me to go and do something can take a few minutes, and re-reading what we already covered is often exactly what you want to do while you wait. Going back to look doesn't interrupt anything: the reply keeps arriving in its own place, and scrolling to the bottom brings you back to it.

If a message of yours didn't get through

Every message you send stays on screen. If one didn't reach me, you'll see a note saying so, right underneath it, asking you to send it again — and both your message and that note stay put until you do, even if something else from me arrives in the meantime. You should never have to retype something you can no longer see.

Starting fresh instead

If you'd rather leave a long conversation behind than scroll through it, you can start a new conversation — the old one is archived, not deleted, and stays one tap away.

Reading a past conversation works differently from the one you're in now, and it's worth knowing which way round: a past one opens at its beginning and reads forward, and scrolling further isn't available there yet — so a very long past conversation shows you its earlier part rather than all of it. Everything in this article about scrolling back applies to the conversation you're currently in.