Are you saying that Time Machine works with iOS devices? All the Google hits I got seem to refer to MacOS.
High Sierra doesn’t go on iOS devices. That was a reference to the minis. Of which there are two in my Apple “ecosystem”... which isn’t so much an ecosystem anymore now that I’ve kicked iTunes out of my life forever...
Technically when iTunes would do proper local iOS backups, Time Machine would then back up the computer including those on-disk iOS backup files, and yes, you could extract an iOS backup from the sparseimage file, and shove it back into iTunes and restore it to an iOS device, but that’s a somewhat advanced topic.
I’ve extracted a couple of years of text messages from one once that way, and restored them to iOS, but it was somewhat painful.
Really the only “killer app” apple has left anymore is iMessage, since there is nothing that truly integrates mobile and desktop messaging that everyone on Android has by default. Forwarding SMS from your carrier to Google Hangouts is about as good as it gets, and that’s not as well integrated as Apple, because Apple forces carriers to send them all your SMS first, before you get it, by default, so they can control the messaging experience.
If they ever get the much touted ability to sync message DELETES across mobile and desktop truly working, that’s a big deal. It’s annoying to sit down at supposedly “integrated” messaging on the desktop and see twenty “new” messages you already answered and deleted on your phone, and see those same message and a badge two days later on your tablet, and again on the office Mac on Monday... they’ve needed to fix that for a very long time.
Even the dumbest email server doesn’t do that and hasn’t since everyone dumped POP3 for IMAP long long ago. Even “offline” or with a network failure, email clients will catch up later and clear the crud when they’re back online.
SMS is a mess. Apple’s implementation is half-finished, and has been for a decade, but beats everyone else’s.
It’s funny. People dumped email for SMS and really they’re the exact same thing, with SMS being the special needs little brother of email who can’t ditch his association with a phone number.
Which partially drove Local Number Portability. If LNP hadn’t been done, we’d all just have “instant email” clients and not know the difference, but without size limitations and the inability to transport multimedia for half a decade.
Basically we all waited around for a decade for SMS to catch up to email, and it’s still not quite there. The kids like it though. LOL. Emojis attach to emails just fine...
