Copy SMS and imessages from one phone to other WITHOUT restoring backup I have a friend who needs to get SMS messages and imessages from an old phone to a new phone.

I understand that restoring the new phone using a backup of the old phone will acheive this.  But this can't work in his situation because the backup is tied to the find my iphone on his ex wife's account.   If he restores that backup his phone constantly asks for the password of his wife's icloud account.  He cannot get that information.

He has tried third party software with no success.

Is there a way to get the messages off one phone onto another without doing the restore backup.

OR, is there a way to prevent the backup tied to the wife's find-my-iphone from being bricked by requiring the wife's icloud password.
I work on a tool called Decipher Phone Refresh (https://deciphertools.com/decipher-phone-refresh.html) running this over the backup and selecting to keep only the Messages app data (definitely not accounts) should accomplish a clean backup with the Messages data that won't require the old iCloud account during setup. So uncheck all of the options, and only check the Messages app data.

Don't select apps, since those will be tied to the old App Store account (which I assume is the same as the iCloud account) and will ask for the password to install the apps.