IMessage/Text Messages Out Of Order

Things can’t be all bad.. you had time to come on this thread of users with a legitimate issue that the manufacturer claimed was already fixed and some how equate it with hardships in your own life. Some of us depend on our devices for work and business. Clients don’t love when they think you’re ignoring them because their message appeared 3 rows up and off the screen. Supervisors like it even less. There are probably hundreds of forums on the internet where you can speak with people when you need some support with struggles and other negatives in your life. We are here trying to get the devices and services that we’ve paid handsomely for to function as intended.

Four days, and iMessages are still correctly threaded. Although I don't believe I saw any "correction" on messages sent before applying the fix(es) that some others have reported.

Turning off "set time zone auto-magically" was probably the fix for me. I did however try a hard reboot, and killing Messages from the home screen because I was expecting old threads to re-order (and they did not).

Also updated 11.2.5, because it explicitly claims to address the issue. So skipping that would be crazy ;-)

Takes two to Tango?

Having read all 10 pages on this thread, and a couple of others, it's not clear to me that fixing ONE phone is always going to solve one's problem.

Sure, that was MY experience, but I have few iMessage users in my rather limited contact set. If none of their phones happen to be affected, then fixing MY phone, solves MY problem.

However, if there were other affected users that were messaging me, should I really expect that updating MY phone should solve THEIR issue?

Might I then expect iMessages coming from their phones to be mis-threaded when they hit my phone?

just spit balling...

My wife and I both have iPhone 6s with iOS 11.2.5 applied on both phones. The messages are still show up in wrong order in conversations between just the two of us.

Interesting that I see a message show up in the right place and split second later move up in thread to a wrong place. Some kind of post processing after message is received screws things up.

So I just swiped to the left a message that I just sent to a friend, to reveal the time of the sent message. To my surprise the timestamp of the message (4:02pm) was actually a minute ahead of the time being displayed at the top of my phone (4:01pm). When my friend immediately replied to my message, the timestamp on his message was 4:01pm, and hence his message was inserted before/above mine in the thread. Test it out for yourself.

I just tried toggling the auto time zone in settings and restarted imessages, this rearranged the messages but the problem continued as soon as I started chatting with my friend again.

Very frustrating! I also have an Apple watch, messages in the correct order on that device

C'mon Apple, please fix this.

You're right, things can't be all bad because it's all about perspective and I look at problems in life as a challenge, as a chance to grow as a person. You may have paid "handsomely" for these devices, but that was a personal choice and entitles you to nothing. I don't have this issue because I spent my money on an Android phone that works much better for me. I'm just on here because I work in IT and part of my job is supporting iOS devices and I like to be in the know about their problems.

Did disabling iMessage work? I tried that for a day and the messages that I was receiving were in order, but a lot of messages I simply did not ever receive. Did not even know that people were texting me.

The problem gotten worse over the last few days. It used to be that only once every few days a conversation would have reordered messages. Restarting Messages app would not only sort the messages in correct order but also keep problem from reappearing for a few days for that conversation. Now the messages are reordered a lot more frequently, several times a day at least, and restarting Messages app does absolutely nothing.

I am wondering what do all people who get reordered messages have in common. Despite all the posts here and all the views, I am guessing this problem only affects a small fraction of iPhone owners. So, we are all on different networks, in different locations, timezones, etc. I noticed that all the reordered messages happen on conversations that are running long, have months worth of messages with pictures, and links, etc. Did anybody ever had messages reordered in a short conversation that's maybe just a few messages or days?

The only connection I’ve noticed so far is that the time zone settings are found to be set to Beijing. Even after the fix and the update it went t back to the incorrect text order.

Im hoping the techs at Apple are working on this. I haven’t seen any feedback from them yet. Disappointed. I have a work phone and I can’t afford a second phone.

The message issue is an iMessage problem, not a text message issue, so any texts that you receive via your phone carrier by SMS will be fine, it's only the ones that come as iMessages from Apple's servers. By disabling iMessage you won't receive any messages that are sent by other Apple users via iMessage until you sign back into iMessage yourself. They will still be sent to your other devices that are connected to iMessage, i.e. iPad and iMac.

Me too! I’ve been having the same issues since late December and every person I talked to over Apple chat would tell me to do something different to my phone. I reset my phone, did a force restart, erased my phone twice and finally they told me to replace the battery and I did. I paid almost 40$ and that didn’t solve my problem. When I contacted Apple again now in February, they told me to erase my phone again and set up as a new device, so I had to download all my apps again and I lost all my messages. That’s so frustrating! I was thinking of updating to an iPhone 7 or 8 but now I might switch to an Android phone...

Found it. The messages are displayed based on the clock of the sender. If my sending clock is off by -10 seconds the recipient will see them 10 seconds earlier in the conversation even though they just received them. I was able to duplicate the issue and place imessages anywhere in the timeline of the converstation by simply switching my clock to manual and changing the time and then send. Apparently the IPhone does not use a universal time sync (NTP) like most networking devices but gets if from your local tower which may be off by several seconds in any direction. Basically the imessage app *****!!! Time to go back to SMS so the messages are displayed as they are received, not based on the the timestamp of the message on the clock of the sending phone which may be off by god knows how much! I'm sure there is a reason for the stupidity, maybe so you can say "I sent that 20 minutes ago, you just didn't read it..." and then you can spoof the time of the message and it will appear that it truly did come in 20 minutes ago and they will be dumbfounded as to how they missed it!

I just watched messages in my conversation being reordered. I sent message and got read receipt with time stamp 10:40 am. The clock on my phone was 10:39. Looks like clocks on two phones are definitely out of sync by a few seconds.

Remove the phone entirely from the conversation. The Messages app does this as well and my Macbook is sync'ed time wise to a proper source... so someone tell me where the issue is here given the phone isn't even part of things here.

My time zone was Chicago and should have been Detroit (1-hour difference). Turning off/on Set Automatically did not re-order previous threads which show me getting the answer before asking the question.