> I would fear that Apple forgets about the feature after a few years and then just drops it.

This is a Google thing to do. Apple seems pretty great at picking and choosing commitments before they launch rather than what you describe here.

Not with online services, they've at least rebranded if not recoded them a few times. mac.com, MobileMe/me.com, icloud.com. It's true that the market is now much more stable, though.

True, but iCloud is over 10 years old now.

Single point of evidence counter to that:

I remember in the early days of the iPhone that it took a couple of years, but eventually I had a smartphone that could gasp copy and paste text ;)

Anybody on any macOS > Catalina? Can you still delete/select multiple messages in Messages app the way you can do on iPhone? Because I can’t on Catalina.

Do the deleted messages on one device syncs and gets deleted on another? No luck here as well. Support replied saying “they’ve checked and their systems are working fine and they can’t do anything about it more”.

This may not help, but here goes. Deleting SMS messages on one device never gets synced to another device for me. I rarely use iMessage, but I expect SMS to also be handled the same way (since I have SMS forwarding setup and get the same messages on multiple devices, with all of them tied to a single Apple ID).

I'm trying to remember any services that Apple has trimmed, and can't seem to come up with any. I'm sure I'm just not remembering. Do you have examples?

Off the top of my head there was Ping, their music social network, and Aperture, the semi-professional photo processing app.

Ping probably shouldn’t have started in the first place, and while I miss the sleek, professional feel of Aperture and its own workflow I’m not sure of any features it had that modern Apple Photos doesn’t have

This happened to me with EndJunk and it was absolutely devastating trying to recover and reset the email address on all of my accounts. Some were straight-up locked out after too many failed password attempts and required email access on the original email address (which I no longer had access to as EndJunk had gone silently under), so I just lost those. Some let me change email addrs if I remembered the password, others required verification at the original and new addr, which again was impossible as EndJunk was just gone.

I guess I got what I paid for.

On the contrary, services are where Apple has been spending a lot of focus, for better or for worse.