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

My kids all share an AppleID. My wife’s phone is merging only two of them. My phone is not doing it for anyone. Not sure why it’s selective like this. Seems like if it was a sharing AppleID issue, it would combine all of our kids. Why is it not doing it to my phone on ios12? If this is a new Apple feature it’s inconsistent, at best. I would put them all under their own ID but I have seven children + my wife and + me. That’s nine accounts and family sharing is limited to six. That means that we’d have to have two family plans. That means we’d have to have two Apple Music subscriptions and won’t be able to share purchases. I also wouldn’t have everyone on Find My iPhone. I use that feature for all of my kids all of the time. I’d have to log into different accounts to find them. Anyone have suggestions?

You are the first person in this thread I have seen say this feature is a benefit. Could you elaborate on that? No sarcasm intended at all. I’m honestly curious. At this point I don’t see how it does anything that couldn’t be done before except force everyone to stop sharing Apple IDs.

Interestingly enough, I have been having this same issue since I upgraded to ios12 which was on September 21st. I had called Apple Support several times and after multiple attempts to resolve I continued to have the issue. I did find a post on this forum that suggested deleting the merged thread of messages which at least allowed me to communicate with my family separately. However, after a couple of hours they would start merging together again. I just kept deleting the thread. Today I have noticed though that they have been kept separate since last night around 7:30pm cst. Is anyone else randomly working now? I really don't know how long it will last but it's the longest it's kept them separate in almost 2 weeks.

So, one way I have solved this (well, it's a workaround) is: I text my daughter and myself at the same so the text goes to HER and not my husband.

We now all have our own AppleID's and a family share plan but it is still happening.

@tinker6700 what he said was not quite how you portray it. iOS 12 overall has been a step change in function and performance. Like any x.0 release, a few problems emerged, and at least some have come as a nasty surprise for a few users. It appears that Apple tried to implement what should be an enhancement to messages by having messages synchronized across all devices owned by a user. This went wrong on two counts, because (a) they failed to take account of users sharing a single Apple ID, and (b) from the reports so far it appears that messages don’t always go consistently as intended to all the devices on a single ID. On point (b) that seems to be a bug. On point (a) the jury is still out on what went wrong and where it went wrong, but at least part of the blame has to be shared by ID-sharing users, but I have a feeling there is also a lot more to this which is keeping Apple R&D on overnight working.

Agreed...surprisingly, the merging behavior seems to have been suspended for the past few days. I hope this might indicate somethings been addressed/fixed, and if that's the case, then it would have to indicate that it was a problem that was fixed on Apple's server end.

Wesley Walls wrote:

Agreed...surprisingly, the merging behavior seems to have been suspended for the past few days. I hope this might indicate somethings been addressed/fixed, and if that's the case, then it would have to indicate that it was a problem that was fixed on Apple's server end.

I can also confirm that the issue has been resolved on my phone as well. I just checked with the people who share the Apple ID and they confirmed that they had made no changes and don't plan on it. I guess this was fixed quietly.

When you say it has resolved, did you delete contacts and restart new threads, and the new threads stopped "re-merging" like they had been doing, or did the threads just "unmerge"? I will do some experimenting later myself when I can devote some attention to it, but I am just curious what your experience was before I start messing around with it too much. Thanks!

kari146 wrote:

When you say it has resolved, did you delete contacts and restart new threads, and the new threads stopped "re-merging" like they had been doing, or did the threads just "unmerge"? I will do some experimenting later myself when I can devote some attention to it, but I am just curious what your experience was before I start messing around with it too much. Thanks!

I deleted the messages a few times. They would always merge back together after 5 - 6 messages. Today I started two new messages like I have each day since this issue arose. So far, they have not merged together again.

One thing of note that I did yesterday was to turn off imessage, restart my phone, and then restart imessage. I have know idea if this had any effect, but it is something that I did.

Best of Luck to you!

I just called Apple support and was VERY surprised to hear that this issue is not a bug and won't be fixed.
I share an Apple ID with my family and have for years. We have 6 iphones, 5 apple TV's a MAC, 4 laptops. We are apple good customers.

However when I updated to IOS12 whenever I text my son its now added to my wifes text string so my son to read, much of which is about him that he now read. Its now doing the same to my other son and adding him to my wifes text but the strings to both my sons are GONE. This is not occurring for my other 2 sons and I can text them directly. Bottom line is that Apple Texting is no longer reliable at this point and they will lose many customers. I did find an article that was published by Forbes about this issue. The advisor said the ONLY way to fix this is to have all of us get our own ID's but this forum has been clear that this doesn't work. Ugh, just got a text from someone who was texting my wife and she said she did not get the text. Its a mess but I guess I will find out soon if she is having an affair.

Folks

For those of you feel as if the issue has been resolved, have you tried this experiment:

Send a sample text to members in your family with whom you share an Apple ID

Ensure that they each log separately under the “Messages” app

Power down your phone

Power up your phone

Go back to the Messages app. See if all people with a shared Apple ID had their messages combined (hopefully not).

OysterDePoyster wrote:

Folks

For those of you feel as if the issue has been resolved, have you tried this experiment:

Send a sample text to members in your family with whom you share an Apple ID

Ensure that they each log separately under the “Messages” app

Power down your phone

Power up your phone

Go back to the Messages app. See if all people with a shared Apple ID had their messages combined (hopefully not).

Hi Oyster, There are two separate issues here. One is families that share Apple ID's and their texts merging and the other is people who don't share Apple ID's but message those that do.

For me, this issue has resolved itself (I did power down my phone just now to make sure the messages did not merge), and I'm happy to report they did not.

For families who share an Apple ID. What may be beneficial is to create new Apple ID's, delete every trace of any message between those members (even old group messages) and on any additional devices, such as ipads and macbooks, log out of imessage, shut down device, restart and then re-enable iMessage. (I have not tried this as I do not have this particular issue).

Best of luck!!!

I’m glad to hear that you were not able to reproduce your problem after members of your family were each moving forward with their own Apple ID. In my case, once my wife and I are able to get a hold of our child’s phone, we should be in the same state that you are in.

As I mentioned to an Apple senior advisor on the phone tonight, although Apple is recommending a separate Apple ID for each family member, I’m sure that there are business applications out there where having a single Apple ID for a set of employees makes a lot of sense, for example, to be used as a tracking device by some supervisor via “find my iPhone”. With one Apple ID, a supervisor could track their entire fleet of vehicles.

It will be very interesting to see if Apple enforce a policy of “one Apple ID per user”, how companies who use Apple IDs in a manner in which I’ve explained here will react to Apple’s suggestion

My guess is that Apple knew that the new update would do this but it is disappointing that they did not give us a head up. I mean if my wife and I were sending naked pics to each other by text and now my 8 year old daughter is on that string and can now see those pictures, that doesn't make for a good situation. Or the text I am now getting from my wifes new lover who thinks its going to her. Many potential issues that were not very well thought out and turned a lot of us loyal apple customers off (I have spent 6 hours on this today). I just talked to a very nice sr. advisor and the only thing he could think of was to go to settings, messages, send/receive and delete the Apple ID there. Has anyone tried that?

Vandy5111 wrote:

I just talked to a very nice sr. advisor and the only thing he could think of was to go to settings, messages, send/receive and delete the Apple ID there. Has anyone tried that?

You cannot delete the ID in that manner ... the only way to remove it is to sign out of iCloud entirely (not just iMessage) and sign back into iCloud with a different ID. I'm shocked that a Sr. Advisor would not know this.

As others have reported, signing out and signing back in with a different ID is not the end-all solution. If Apple's iMessage servers have associated your phone number with the shared ID, signing out doesn't immediately disassociate your phone number from that ID -- it may take several hours. During that time, and maybe beyond, any iMessage threads you were a part of while sharing the ID will continue to get mixed up, on your end and even senders who were not sharing an ID. Signing out, signing back in with a different ID, waiting, and deleting prior iMessage threads in which the shared ID was used may be the only way to get clear of this.