Stored messages randomly duplicated.
New to iPhones here. Have had a mac and iPad for many years, but finally got an iPhone to bring everything together in one place to make it easier learn some specific accessibility features. After a couple of attempts with the Move to IOS app, I was able to successfully move all the messages from my Android to my new iPhone SE 3. It took me about a week to work out the kinks from the transfer, ensuring all my contacts are correct, messages were sending/receiving on all 3 devices, and that I have the apps I need.
Suddenly today my stored messages started showing duplicates in old chats that I haven't sent or responded to in awhile. Not actively receiving or sending duplicates, but the entire chat from years ago to most recent was duplicated in total. I can't figure out what caused this, or how to feasibly remove the duplicates without a massive use of time. I can go through the chats and delete one of each message, but that would take too much time. I could try and reset my phone again and load them back over from Android, but I would lose the last weeks worth of messages and I am not sure if the iCloud backup would just cause the issue all over again anyways.
I was receiving the "Messages in iCloud not available as iCloud and iMessage accounts do not match" during my effort in troubleshooting this. I only have one Apple ID, and it is logged into all my devices. The only new addition is adding my phone number to an iPhone and using iCloud to back everything up together.
Has anyone seen this happen? Is there an easy way to remove the duplicates without manually removing one at a time or deleting entire chats that I would like to keep?
Some notes:
I initially had Gmail contacts and Apple contacts enabled. Once I got all my contacts transferred over, I removed the Gmail for everything except the calendar updates I share with my family.
My messages were fine up until today. Then randomly (from what I can tell), some of my chats duplicated. Not all of them, and none of my recent ones. It also appears that it didn't affect any group chats, just individual ones. From my best guess, it appears to only have affected my conversations with contacts who I believe already had an iPhone.
None of these contacts are duplicated, and I have already done several resets of all my devices and removed and re-added my message account. At this point I'm pretty sure that it's uploaded to my iCloud with these strange duplicates.
Thanks for your time, sorry for the long post.
iPhone SE, iOS 17