Hi all - when I installed iOS12 on my devices I got a notification that iMessage conversations coming from or to a specific person would be merged into one single conversation thread, if they were seperated.
I did not observe that this happened - I still have several iMessage conversation threads from the same Person. So nothing has changed. Does this work for someone else?
Thanks, Stefan
iPhone X, iOS 12
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
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
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 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!
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.
AppleIDs are designed to be used by one and only one person and it is normal for conversations to/from the same AppleID to be merged regardless of the contact method.
Be sure each person has their own AppleID and never share one.
Have your family members each create their own individual Apple ID and set up Family Sharing if that was your original intention.
Apple has long warned against using a single AppleID for sharing - their official position is to use one AppleID for each person, and that references to a particular AppleID will be treated as if it were the same person.
To make this clear again: This thread is NOT about sharing AppleIDs but about one person with one AppleID having different conversation threads in iMessage coming from the same person. So when I open iMessage I see person A twice, meaning I see the icon of this person twice in iMessage (probably one time for conversations related to phone number and one time for conversations related to [@me email] address. My understanding was, that with iOS12 these conversations should have been merged. What chadfromparadise wrote unfortunately did not work for me.
[Email Edited by Host]This is unfortunately not helpful, many of us have been using shared apple IDs for years to get shared contacts and notes ... these are still not supported by family sharing so we still NEED to be able to use a single apple ID for multiple people (until of course Apple gets this part of sharing working).
IOS12 made this change and unlike people above I did not see a message telling me that my conversations would be merged. I would like to see a link to that in the patch notes (yes I read them).
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.
False alarm. Ugh. So frustrating. My wife and I cannot text each other again this morning. Perhaps there is a group text somewhere that I missed that still needs to be deleted. This problem shouldn't be happening now that I've created separate Apple IDs for everyone. Please, anyone have any suggestions???
Agreed. Williams answer is not a solution to this problem. Being told that a single Apple ID can’t be shared (especially amongst a family with small children) is ridiculous. This is a problem that started with iOS 12 and it needs to be fixed by Apple
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.
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.
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.
Merging iMessage Conversations in iOS 12
