iPhone 15 Pro Max Messages still downloading after phone-to-phone transfer?

[Soybomb]

Friday I did a phone-to-phone transfer, which I figured copied all data over but I noticed that when i look at a contact in messages, either a limited number of photos show or for some contacts none at all.

Searches show this being reported for years and people trying to cycle icloud/messages sync, siri indexing, all the way to full resets. No clear fix and in some cases just posts that say in like a week it resolved itself.

Anyone else seeing this behavior? I've rebooted a couple times. If I go to disable messages icloud sync it warns me it isn't finished downloading. I left it on the charger all day yesterday in case it only downloads when powered. I only have 10G of messages data and fast enough internet where that shouldn't take long to download. I'm not even sure what's needing to be downloaded if I copied data from the old phone.

Anyone else see anything like this or are all your old images shared with contacts in messages populated? I'm hoping to wipe the old phone soon but would love to see this finish first.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

Phone-to-phone transfer just transfers information that isn't on a cloud service. The new phone will continue syncing things like contacts, calendars, photos, message history, email, etc. etc. etc. long after it's "done" with the original device. Keep the new device plugged into power & on wifi, don't try to "Speed things up" by rebooting etc (because that has the opposite of the intended effect).

 

[newellj]

This is normal and also shows up in other native apps. The other app where I see this a lot is the Fitness app, which can take a long time to download old workouts and awards.