It is not difficult, no. In the contrary it is amazingly simple, easier than on any other platforms I have ever done it. (well, except on SFOS which is pretty much the same thing as on Harmattan...) Proof-of-my-point: I tried to back up SMS'es from my wife's Lumia device, and it is absolutely impossible! There is no application to do it, and no access to any kind of command line either! Absolutely impossible! The only way to do it is to copy and paste each bloody SMS message manually to evernote client... You bet this takes time if there are lots of messages... I also needed to do this to a friend's Samsung Android device, and yes, of course it was unrooted! I had to wrestle with the damn device a fair while to find a way to get at the SMS storage without accidentally wiping it while in the process... Apple IOS devices... I have no idea! (never had to try that on IOS, lucky me...) On harmattan you don't even need any application to do that. Of course you can use SMSBoat which is pretty neat way to do it but you can also do without any external tools; The SMS database is plain sqlite which you can dump in text mode by a simple query script