iMessages wildly screwed up on my daughter's phone

[neilw]

A few months ago we gave my daughter my old iPhone 5s. It's her first proper phone. I set the whole thing up for her. It's running iOS12, pretty much up-to-date.

Generally things are fine except iMessages is wildly screwed up and getting worse. Here's the list of problems:

1) On incoming messages, *sometimes* the incoming number is shown instead of the contact name. I have tried virtually all of the suggested remedies online to fix this; none have helped. This problem is particularly bad in group chats.
2) Phone numbers are *sometimes* shown in proper US format, sometimes just a block of numbers. I have confirmed that the region is set to US.
3) Some conversation duplicates have recently appeared.
4) In one of her group chats she recently received one of her own messages.

I've been fighting this for a while to no avail. It's time to nuke it from orbit, I think, but I'm not sure of the best way to do that. If I reset the phone and restore it from backup, it would seem that I'll be restoring whatever is broken.

Anyone have suggestions? Would the Genius Bar be able to help with this sort of issue?

 

[Gyroworld]

Restore the phone using iTunes to iOS 12.1.2 and then setup as new phone.

 

[neilw]

"Setup as new phone" would include restoring from an iCloud backup, right? Can't just lose all data. Or would the idea be to *not* do a proper restore, and just log into iCloud to bring back all the synched data. In that case, I guess I'd lose data for any apps that are not iCloud synched (probably acceptable), and would need to manually reload all app (also probably not too bad).

 

[sean000]

Have you contacted Apple? And is she signed in under her own personal AppleID? Were contacts imported from any external source? I would assume that last one is a no if this is her first phone.

 

[neilw]

She's logged in under her ID, and all contacts are new. Had a long call with Apple last night, and fixed problem #2, at least in Contacts, by toggling the region away from US and then back to US. This also seems to have caused all the *individual* chats in iMessages to be shown correctly with contact info. The group chats, however, are still a hot mess.

Last thing I tried last night was re-initializing the phone and restoring from iCloud backup. That seems to have changed nothing.

Today we're going to try to just delete all the group chats that are causing problems, and start fresh on those chats. If they're still messed up at that point I'll be calling Apple again.

 

[sean000]

She's logged in under her ID, and all contacts are new. Had a long call with Apple last night, and fixed problem #2, at least in Contacts, by toggling the region away from US and then back to US. This also seems to have caused all the *individual* chats in iMessages to be shown correctly with contact info. The group chats, however, are still a hot mess.

Last thing I tried last night was re-initializing the phone and restoring from iCloud backup. That seems to have changed nothing.

Today we're going to try to just delete all the group chats that are causing problems, and start fresh on those chats. If they're still messed up at that point I'll be calling Apple again.

That sounds totally frustrating, but at least your efforts gained some improvements. I don’t know if this will help, but once in a group chat my wife went to add a phone number in the group to her contacts. Instead of creating a new contact she accidentally added the new phone number to her sister’s contact card (she shares the same name as the person she tried to add). Suddenly iMessage made it look like her sister was the one on the group chat. She corrected the contact cards, but it still looked like her sister was on the group chat. A day or two later the group chat displayed the correct contact info. So my theory (and this is not based on much of anything solid) is that messages have their own hidden header info that routes messages and displays contact info based on matching header metadata with your personal contacts. It doesn’t seem to sync up with your contacts right away all the time. Maybe new messages from your chat partner(s) triggers it? Maybe it’s just something you have to allow for a little time to resolve?

I think you are on the right track deleting the messed up chats to see what happens. It does seem like group chats are more prone to weirdness than one to one chats.

 

[neilw]

What's most frustrating is how opaque the whole thing is. Hidden metadata? Could be, who knows?

I'll give it all a few days and see if anything starts behaving, otherwise back on the phone with Apple, although I don't have high hopes for a clean solution.