I'd rather prefer a chat app that stores all chat history and media on my device instead of some cloud.

On my iPhone WeChat starts fine without having the location services permission.

Don’t worry, the Chinese government stores all your Wechat data for you on a cloud ;)

They just need to add automatic chat log pruning. 16GB of 32GB of storage fills quickly.

What the heck kind of group chats are you in that has ~2 billion words in the history?

Videos and gifs?

Fair.

You can't clear chats? iMessage has a similar issue and you solve it by deleting the chat and then rejoining / continuing it again.

There isn't automatic conversation trimming? This is a feature Signal added years ago, I'm surprised iMessage doesn't have it. Then again, Apple seems to have the whole iMessage platform in maintenance mode, the biggest updates are emojis, no giphy integration or new features coming out biweekly or anything like that.

iMessage does have it on iOS - you can set it to keep 30 days, 1 year, or unlimited. It also supports apps and comes with a GIF app out of the box.

iMessage on the Mac however, is utter unmaintained garbage.

anecdotal feedback though.. your objection to them needing gps permission doesn't stack up at all against the robust platform wechat has become, which hundreds of millions depend on for everyday transactions.

So the OP's point of people in China mainly needing WeChat is 100% relevant. While your side comment about what a single user doesn't like about wechat is 100% irrelevant.

Foreign competitors are banned. If I lived in PRC I'd probably have to suck it up and use it.