Why is iMessage combining two contacts into one thread. I can only text back the last one that messaged me. This started with iOS 12

Completely understand. I type in Sons number type messages hit send .... message immediately changes to daughter-in-laws number. Have taken their name and information completely out of my contacts & rebooted phone also refreshed iCloud.

I’m told it’s not ios12. I don’t believe them...

It is IOS 12. This is my concern as well. You can't trust iMessage anymore. IOS 11 and previous IOS let people get by with sharing an Apple ID, but IOS 12 does not. It IS Apple's way of nudging users to use individual Apple ID's.

My concern is that I can't control how people use their Apple ID's so I can't ever truly know that my message is going to the intended recipient. Time to utilize other messaging Apps.

The simple fact is that it might be a problem with iOS 12, or it might be something going wrong in the Apple backend servers which support iOS, or even where they perform their lookup to decide whether the recipient device is online and the message should be sent by iMessage, or by SMS. It could even be a combination of several apparently trivial issues. Only Apple can determine what is going wrong after a proper investigation, and until then it is pointless to speculate.

I am having the same problem . It started when I upgraded my iPhone 6 to the XS Max and now both of my daughters texts are merging as one . I have tried deleting both of their contact info and putting them back into my phone and it still does it . Even when I actually type in one of their cell phone numbers . Any one fix this yet ?’

The following work-around failed and I’m surprised that it did. Here’s what we did:

A, B and C all shared an Apple ID. B now has their own. A and C share an Apple ID. All three turn off iMessage. A and B cleared their histories of any messages that involved A, B or C in any combination.

A sends a text to B

A sends a text to C

“A” sees different conversation histories for each in Messages and the history only contains the texts noted above

“A” shuts down their phone and powers it back up. On A’s phone, the two previously-separate conversation histories of B and C are combined.

Hoping that this input helps Apple

Curious ...

After obliterating any message thread that any of us are included in, pairwise or in larger groups in and out of the family and after sending a single text message to members of my family, I consistently am able to have all single message threads of others in my family merge immediately after my phone powers down and powers up. The “two hours” comment is interesting. In your case, has anyone in your circle other than you rebooted their phone?

All

It’s this type of dialogue that will help the folks who are reading this and troubleshooting this issue or, amongst us, come up with a work around. I will try to reply to the questions asked of me here.

The nature of this situation implies that Apple does not want this problem and that it’s a bug. If an end user is to change behaviors, Apple would have advertised what those changes should be. The fact that they did not implies that this is an unwanted behavior by Apple.

In my scenario, A and B live together. C is in college, but we communicate our various work around attempts via phone calls.

As far as deleting a years worth of history in an attempt to find a work around, it’s either that or do nothing and keep intra-family communication broken. Both options stink.

In my scenario, B established their own Apple ID. To the outside world, as far as email/voice/text communication goes, nothing needs to change on how the outside world communicates with B. No other identifying info on B changed. Further, the information in “contacts” on A and C’s phone on how to communicate with B shouldn’t have to change. In my case, A, B and C all have their own Gmail/Hotmail email IDs.

A work around that calls for unregistering a phone number then re-registering it is kind of “extreme”. I’m entertaining work arounds that we can implement on our own.

A couple of thoughts:

To me, the ultimate attempt at a work around is that A, B and C all obtain unique Apple IDs, turn off iMessage in messages, log out of their Apple ID in FaceTime, disallow iCloud text messaging, delete all texts previously involving A, B and C in any manner and retrying the test of sending one message per person, shutting down a phone and seeing if messages collapse together after booting up.

Also, the fact that this is taking so long to resolve, I’m thinking that in Apple land, the problem isn’t so much how to correct the software (... that’s seemingly as simple, on their end, to use the same iMessage threading protocol that they used in iOS 11.X...), but the cleanup of the damage done to the data as a result and the possible difficulty of identifying how to go through a bunch of messages that were unwantedly merged and having forensic data to determine, in my case, how to put B and C’s data back into their own buckets as opposed to their merged state.

Only Forbes has had coverage of this issue. The tech community and Larry Magit’s of the world need to shed light here to the public-at-large - TV ... Radio ... etc

Another thing that makes me think this is solely a message problem and not a "you each need separate id's" thing is that all the facetime calls that we do have been going to the correct person. Just the messages is having a problem realizing which device to go to.

This is a terrible problem. I have 4 family members (myself and three kids) on a single icloud account. My wife has a separate icloud account. After upgrading their phones to iOS12, my wife started reporting that the wrong messages were going to the wrong kids. I had not updated my phone yet (work phone) so I seemed unaffected. Did the usual; make sure only configured to send/receive from their respective phone numbers, signed out of icloud. I even created separate icloud accounts for all the kids but it still threads messages or sends them to the wrong phone. All phones do use the same account for iTunes purchases, perhaps this is an issue. After creating new icloud accounts for everyone I deleted all messages from all family members to each other - individual and group - from everyone's phone. Issue persists. I have even seen the header of a text message switch names from "Kid A" to "Kid B" as I watched. Apple needs to fix this problem. There is no justifiable explanation for it to work this way intentionally.

pavelbure77 wrote:

Another thing that makes me think this is solely a message problem and not a "you each need separate id's" thing is that all the facetime calls that we do have been going to the correct person. Just the messages is having a problem realizing which device to go to.

Unfortunately it is an Apple ID issue. Apple servers (or however the back-end stuff works) now link phone numbers that are registered under one Apple ID. Just like they route an imessage as an imessage and not as SMS. This effectively makes the users who were getting by on shared Apple ID's create individual Apple IDs and utilize family sharing.

I hope this helps you. I have people I message with that still won't separate their Apple ID's and thus all of our messages are merged and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I'm not happy with what has happened since IOS 12, but I believe these are the reasons behind it.

iMessage is combining my husband, son and daughter into one thread and I can only text the last person who texted me. It’s very frustrating! I did send my problem to Apple and hope they fix this soon!

I have faced this since one of the earliest Betas. Have yet to find a fix. It appears as though making a group chat, and putting effected contacts in will negate the issue.

I put my mother and father into a group chat, and they show up separately (Eg: “Mom: Howdy, it’s mom! Dad: Hi, It is Dad.”

I cannot text them separately, but it does give me contact to both individuals.

Otherwise I haven’t figured out anything. They do use the Family AppleID.

If it helps: you can log into iCloud as your appleID, and the AppStore as a different one. And that separates your iMessage (Eg: iTunes & AppStore is “FamilyAccount@provider.com”. iCloud is “zagioppo@me.com”). Have yet to see if that fixes it. Feel free to try and let me know :)

I downloaded iOS 12 when it was first available in September. For a week, I had the same frustrating problem with myself and my teenage daughter. Our iMessage threads were merged into one under my Apple ID with my Apple ID icon. So everything I had texted to myself was showing up in that conversation. It was extremely annoying and I thought about setting up family sharing with an Apple ID for my daughter, but she did not want to do that because she did not want to lose her data with her apps. So, after many different ways to try to solve this including generating a new text message & typing her contact name in, which would show her in the contact and then as soon as I sent the message it would merge it again, I found a solution. I started a new text message & typed in her phone number with the area code, and ever since then, I was able to retrieve her thread by itself with all of our pre-existing iMessages intact. Now I can go to iMessages and click on her thread as usual, and it will only sent it to her phone.

Yes everyone rebooted their phone... it looked like it was fixed at the time. When checking intermittently all looked well. Approximately 2 hours in I opened messages and message was back to one thread.

Have gave up on messaging for time being...

From the families I know, and from the way it appears in this thread, I would say most share. Off the top of my head, ALL of the families I personally know that use Apple share an ID. I’m sure there are some that do not share but certainly enough that saying most do not is inacc