"Recent" contact groups, showing up in Messages as suggested contacts.

After posting my reply, a friend thinks he has stumbled upon a "solution".

Since he shared with me what he did to remove this annoying clusters of groups and I followed what he did, I have none of the "groups" appearing (so far - and it has been two full days).

Here is what he discovered: When you type in the name of the person to whom you wish to send a text and the list of contact clusters appear, you will notice an "i" in a circle next to the "cluster" of contacts. Tap on the "i" and you will be taken to a screen called "RECENT" and to the right of "RECENT" you will see "REMOVE". Click on "REMOVE". You will then be asked if you want to "REMOVE FROM RECENTS". Click on "REMOVE FROM RECENTS".

So far this has worked for me. It was a pain to do because you have to do this for each and every cluster.

Now when I type in a friend's name, I get his/her name at the top as my first choice. YEAH!!! (for now)

The problem as I have seen it happen is:

You go to messages

You click on the icon to start a new message with whoever (someone in your contacts)

... the way it used to work is the software would auto populate a recents list with your contact listing their mobile number, or their email address, or in some cases an recent group text of which the person was a part. But their mobile was generally 1st or 2nd on that list.

Now for some reason the contact with their mobile

number does not show up until you scroll way down the recents list or drill down on some group text. Sometimes not at all.

You can restart over and over again and it will not resolve it. The confusion for people is

that they are not doing anything different the they have always done.

__________________________ Here is how I fixed this:

- Hit the icon in the upper right to start a new chat.

- You begin to type the name of someone in your contacts.

- Right away you get a list of "recents" that will have that person listed any number of ways.

In this scenario you get the person with their email or part of a group (which you my not want)

- To the right of each recent with that persons name is the little "i" in a circle.

- Click on that, and Remove any recent that you do not want. This does not remove the chat just how it shows up in recents.

Eventually you can start a new chat with your contact, choose their mobile and after a couple of times a NEW FRESH recent will be created at the top of the list with their mobile number.

I had this same problem.

Here is what I did to fix it.

Go to SETTINGS > CONTACTS > Siri & Search >

Turn "Find Contacts in Other Apps" and "Search & Siri Suggestions" both to OFF.

That solved it for me.

It has thankfully reverted to the way contacts were presented before the iOS 11 upgrade.

Good luck!

Here's how to get rid of them: If you want to start a massive cleanup session, you will want to start a

message with each letter of the alphabet and look for contacts with the "i" symbol to the right. If you tap on that, you will see the option to "Remove from recents." Tap it and that contact is gone.

It took a while to go through the whole alphabet and scroll through all contacts and groups with the “i” symbol to the right, but it worked and got rid of all the groups as well as lot of contacts that weren’t even in my contacts anymore.

You might check the reply about clicking the info button next to each group that pops up and then “remove from recents” to clear them out.

Hello hoppe16. Thanks very much for your suggestion. A few other people have suggested similar and I've tried this fix a couple of times without success. HOWEVER, I tried it again recently and discovered (quite by mistake) that this DOES work but ONLY IF i've ALREADY got a text message in my Message Inbox to the person I'm trying to compose a new text to. As soon as I delete a conversation to a person they disappear from the list of suggested contacts the next time I try to text them. So this might explain why I've been having this problem - i don't like clutter in my Inbox so i tend to delete conversations as soon as I've finished with them. I know that many of my friends who don't have this issue are people who don't delete conversations. It's not the ideal solution for me because it means I've got to keep messages in my Inbox I don't want - but it's better than nothing!!

This happened to my father's phone as well. In his case, we could find the original contact somewhere in the list of groups, just WAY down the list. What fixed it for us was to compose a new text (not replying to an existing thread) to the individual (my father sent a test text to me) and have them reply. What I mean is, tap the compose message icon, find the person's name in the very long list of groups, then send them a quick note (we just typed "test"). Then, have that person respond back. After that, the person's name should appear on as the first option. It appears that my father's phone was simply thinking that the most recent message my father sent me was in all of these group settings. As soon as he composed a "new" message to me, it recognized that and put my name on the top of his list of choices when composing a new message.

Hope this makes sense and helps someone out.

I have been having the same problem. If you go to settings, contacts, and turn off Siri suggestions. This help me get back to individual contact first vs group contact.

Hope this helps. :)

I happen to find that if you type a . before the first few characters of the name ... it at least brings up individual contacts phone numbers and email addresses. At least it omits the groups. Works for me, anyway.

🙂

OK, so I just chatted with a specialist and we think he solved the problem. Something got mixed up with my contacts so I shut off contacts in my icloud settings and deleted all the contacts. Then, I just turned the contacts back on. I was immediately able to address a text message to my daughter which wasn't working before I did that. Now, I'll see if this problem has truly been fixed over the next few days.

Hi Dimitra,

I do know this was a known issue on the 11.1.1 version for quite a while. The 11.2 update is out now - released on the 2nd.

If you've not updated, do so

Hopefully that will help.

Submit feedback to Apple:

Apple.com/feedback

Not really. I am trying turning off Siri & Search suggestions in Settings-Contacts

Tell me if this works...

Go into settings, contacts, Siri & Search, make sure Find Contacts in Other Apps is turned OFF.