Merging iMessage Conversations in iOS 12

I contacted Apple support under Iphone, appleid issue, an agent called me back within 3 minutes.

Step 1: She had me go into settings/ messages/ send-receive at and only have your cell# checked (no email address) on all 4 phones.

Step 2: She had us delete any group texts and individual texts with all 4 phones on my appleid.

Things cleared up !!!! She had the issue with a client day before and this fixed them up as well. She said after IOS12 update it was still trying to find/confused in delivery to those in the phones in the apple id. Hope this helps everyone out as I really did NOT want to create 3 more apple ids.

I realize this is different than the original posted problem. We’re having almost exactly the same scenario as you are stevedore761 and went thru almost the same hoops today, both in the Apple store and for hours on the phone. Finally the supervisor I was speaking with found out from her superior that there’s an “iMessage server issue” and they are aware and working on it. She said they also suggested that a possible workaround is to delete all threads including the affected people (we all have our own Apple ids as of today). I may also try deleting emails from their send and receive tab as suggested. However she said honestly until they fix the problem they can’t guarantee anything will work. They also suggested we just keep getting the updates until the fix is added. Very frustrating, but we’ve decided for now to just send our daughters a group text addressing them by name when we need to text them. Crazy, but at least that works and we can be assured the intended recipient is seeing the text and tell which one is texting us back!

No, even if a message originates from the same AppleID, iOS Messages will treat messages that come from different "from" addresses as disparate message threads as it bases them on the "from" address.

I have submitted a bug to Apple about this. It's infuriating me beyond measure. And I'm a huge Apple fanboy. Apple MUST fix this. I upgraded to iOS 12 on our 4 iPhones (my X, wife's 6s Plus, boys' 2 5s's), all our iMessage/Text messages are now merged and using the same thread. I didn't ever see any message asking if we wanted to merge anything--it's possible one of my boys did and tapped YES. Either way, what a ridiculous "feature". I try to text my wife by specifically typing in her name or number into a new message then when I send the message, it goes to my son instead. But if I scroll up in the text history, it's the year-old text history I've had with my wife all along, but now I'm having the conversation with my son! It's just wrong! Then my wife IS able to text me and the contact picture of my son now changes back to my wife's and I'm back in a conversation with her. This is so messed up. I called Apple support last night and spoke with tech support for 30-40 mins about it. The tech recommended many things, but overall, to create new Apple IDs for my sons and my wife. I did not want to do this, but I did it anyway to try and fix, separated out everyone with their own Apple ID, got one of my boy's his very first email address, reset settings on iPhones, rebooted, turned iMessage off and on to re-register it, deleted all of the other 3 people's contacts on each iPhone, rebooted some more, and it still did not work. I've been sharing my Apple ID with my wife for years now, and for the last 2 years with my 2 boys' 5s's. Haven't had any problems with it. I know ALL about the "Send and Receive" setting in Settings > Messages, but this is beyond that--that's not the issue here. This is a mess and Apple dropped the ball big time on this one. They need to fix it ASAP--especially since I have now separated out each iPhone into their own Apple IDs and the problem persists. Only thing left to try after I get off work tonight is going into each iPhone and deleting all the texts and group texts for each of the other 3 contacts. Hopefully that can clear it up!

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions for me, please let me know. Sorry this was so long, but I'm just furious about this change they made, intentional or not. Thanks!

Are the separate IDs new?

It's possible something somewhere has the information cached, but I'm not sure who.

I'm sure you've tried deleting the combined threads then rebooting the device, but try that if you haven't.

FIXED! The workaround to delete all group texts or any texts with the contacts that are merged—it works! I did see the problem come back because on one of the 4 phones, I missed deleting one of them, once that got deleted, it was fixed again and we were all able to text each other separately again. Keep in mind, with mine, I got separate Apple IDs for all 4 of us. But the same might work even if you share an Apple ID by following this fix/suggestion. Make sure you remove ALL conversations with ANY or ALL of the affected/merged contacts. That worked for me.

Mine has been doing this since the XS Max came in the mail...

It is between my husband and my son, like everyone else-but they have separate Apple IDs. Our son is under the family /minors id of our Apple ID ~ but he has a completely separate email and password that he uses to sign into everything. And we have 6 kids, all with their own id ~ and all of them message me. Only one of them, and my husband, get merged.

Deleting the message chat fixes it temporarily... until they have both texted me again.

My son is not running iOS 12, hubs and I are.

We have also noticed that we can’t dial certain phone number with the Max phone.. but our kids can dial them just fine.. another issue, another thread.

It is an extremely annoying issue isn’t it?? Apple needs to fix it. My wife’s and son’s texts have merged together like 5 times since my last comment here. And like you have done, I delete the thread(s) and I can text them separately again, for a little while. Then it just merges back again. Not sure what to do about this anymore. I guess I could completely delete and restore all our iPhones. And then just configure them all fresh, not from a backup. How annoying would that be? Sheesh, we shouldn’t have to go to that length! It’s totally a bug.

I may have found a temporary workaround for this. At least it has not gotten merged back since I’ve done this. This is NOT a permanent fix but merely a band-aid that seems to be working in my situation.

My son’s phone/contact that keeps merging with my wife’s (for whom I also created a new Apple ID), the last time it merged, I deleted the thread as usual, but this time I am now only texting him back at his new iCloud email address as opposed to his phone number. Rather, it’s an iMessage, since you can use iMessages to text other iPhone users via the phone number OR an email address. So far, no merging of the threads has occurred yet on either my wife’s nor on my iPhone. It’s still not a perfect solution to the issue, but I’m not losing my mind now where I have to delete the thread every day. Apple still needs to fix this. It’s not a feature, it’s a bug.

Delete any text or group texts that contain the people that are associated with your appleid. If you your wife and any kids share your apple id, delete those individual & group texts.

The official position of Apple, at least according to the senior Apple Support tech I spoke to yesterday is that they have not introduced (deliberately) any code to stop people from sharing Apple IDs and in particular they have not introduced any code (deliberately) that would be causing this. They introduced Family Sharing to help people share so people did not have to shard IDs but so far there is no official policy telling users they MUST use separate IDs.

Anyway, we use them this way and this is a major inconvenience for people that shard IDs like I do with my wife. My phone now shows me having a conversation with myself where it used to have a message thread between my wife and I ... this is not useful.

Yes, two of them are new (my wife's already existed but she had never really used it yet). I do think it's because of some threaded group messages from way back. I fixed it again...for now. When it merges my son's and wife's text message, I just delete that message, and they're separate again. Hopefully, the problem won't come back anymore. My wife turned off iMessage and she's afraid to turn it back on. She's becoming more irate than I am about this issue now. I'll let folks know if I have any updates on this or if issue stays fixed after some time. I hope Apple can recognize this is a real issue that needs to be addressed. Thanks for the help/tips William.

Per usual, the only answer I have for you is:

Feedback - iPhone - Apple

Having very similar problem. Since updating when I try to text my son it goes to my wife’s text history. If I go to his contact and select text it immediately switches to my wifes number. He can however text me