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My girlfriend and I have been using the Couple messaging app [0] to keep in touch. It has lots of texts and photos going back to the start of our relationship. They are valuable memories, but there is no way to export them.

The iOS App Store says that app hasn't been updated since 2014, and my emails to Couple are going unanswered. Their blog [1] says that they sold out to Life360, but they are also not answering my emails.

So I was wondering if anyone could help me to export my texts and photos from Couple. They have both a mobile phone app and a web app.

[0] https://couple.me/

[1] http://blog.couple.me/2016/02/12/new-home-couple/

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  • I originally posted this question to the Super User community, but it was off topic: superuser.com/questions/1115282/…
    – Brian Schack
    Aug 22, 2016 at 21:02
  • Well, I doubt if there is any direct method to do this. This is might be regarded off-topic on Apple.SE as well. If the developer does not provide any method, there really isn't any way other than to "hack" the information out of it. If you're good at coding, You could try parsing the WebApp pages of conversation and write it onto a text file.
    – Jash Jacob
    Aug 23, 2016 at 6:24
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    @JashJacob I'm afraid you are be correct that they only way is to "hack the information out of it." I tried choosing View Source, but I don't see any of our conversations. I think their JavaScript is downloading the conversations from somewhere else, but I don't know where.
    – Brian Schack
    Sep 2, 2016 at 0:36
  • Yes. It's querying for the information. You'll need parser to get the information from the webpage once it's loaded. You could try "Selenium" which is a browser automation tool to use grab information once the page has completely finished loaded (all JS executions are complete)
    – Jash Jacob
    Sep 2, 2016 at 5:52
  • @JashJacob Good tip, I will install Selenium and try downloading the messages with it.
    – Brian Schack
    Sep 7, 2016 at 16:47

1 Answer 1

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I'm leaving the Couple app for the same reason. It's a shame. I was a huge advocate for it over the past few years.

Good news. I found a way to get all your messages.

  1. Visit https://app.couple.me/ and log in.
  2. Open a separate tab and visit https://app.couple.me/1/p/timeline (this may take a while to load depending on how many messages you have).
    • This API is how it fetches your messages while you're scrolling (but it batches it by 55 messages at a time).
    • Let me know if this URL doesn't work. I don't believe it's user-specific (but the number 1 can seemingly be interchanged with numbers between 1 and 31). If you want to try and find it yourself, open up the Network Inspector in Chrome and scroll until a batch of messages has to be fetched. There should be a url with the word 'timeline' in it that shows up (you'll need to strip off anything passed 'timeline' from the url to get all of your messages).

  3. You should now have a JSON representation of all of your messages.

    • i.e. A lot should look like this

      {
    "eventType": "text",
    "text": "A cat?",
    "pairingID": [redacted by me],
    "timeStamp": 1345602786515,
    "itemID": "[redacted by me]",
    "lID": "[redacted by me]",
    "from": "[email protected]"
}
    • Event types of 'text' allow you to see the texts you've written. Event types of 'image' have an image url you can download.
  4. From the File menu, select 'Save Page As...' and save the file (onto your desktop and name it couple_backup.json if you want to use the tip below).
  5. That's it!

I'm not sure how comfortable your are with the JSON format. But all the data is there for the pickin'. In case you're not super comfortable, here's a way to get the JSON to be slightly more readable (only will work on a Mac):

  1. Open the Terminal app.
  2. Paste cat ~/Desktop/couple_backup.json | python -m json.tool > ~/Desktop/formatted_couple_backup.json into a Terminal window and hit Enter.
    • This should format the JSON to make it more readable and save that to a file named formatted_couple_backup.json on your Desktop

Maybe I'll create a Couple Exporter app one day to help people like us that could go through and automatically download all the images or something. This can work for now.

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    Genius, thanks so much, Matt! I'll try this right away.
    – Brian Schack
    Sep 20, 2016 at 18:52
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    I just tested your solution, and it works perfectly!
    – Brian Schack
    Sep 20, 2016 at 19:10
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    Glad it worked!
    – Matt Kahl
    Sep 27, 2016 at 21:27

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