My family has a text group for posting our daily Wordle patterns and miscellaneous other talk among ourselves. We are all iPhone users except one Android holdout. This all seemed to work fine until fairly recently when the group acquired the name "Wordle Family" and the group started splitting into multiple versions of "Wordle Family" for seemingly no reason. Sometimes these groups would stay separate with separate messages; sometimes they would rejoin, again for seemingly no reason. This frustrated us and led to much discussion in the group. I think I understand the problem now and will write about it here and save the group messages for family discussion.
What changed? Apple recently started to support a new standard for texting with non-Apple phones, RCS. RCS provides many better features than MMS, the previous interoperability standard. But there is a significant difference. Unlike MMS, RCS operates over internet connections (like Apple iMessage) and not over the mobile provider's voice/text network. Like with iMessage, if you don't have a good internet connection but have a voice/text connection, your texts will drop back to MMS.
Unlike MMS, RCS also supports naming chats. Until Apple supported RCS, our group chat could not be named. Once RCS was supported, it was possible to name our group chat. Names for group chats propagate to everyone in the group chat. It seems to be very hard to remove a name because the name keeps coming back if anyone (or even multiple people) tries to remove it.
An RCS named Chat recognizes the members partly through the technology they use (RCS or MMS). So, if any member of the chat switches from RCS to MMS because of their network connection, the phone thinks it is a different group with the same name, a new Wordle Family. When the person switches back to RCS because of their network connection, they come back into the regular Wordle Family, and that old Wordle Family stops receiving texts. Until that same person switches to MMS, then the old branch suddenly comes back with the few old texts that were sent. Sometimes the old branch recognizes that a member switched to the new technology and merges everyone back into the old branch. So, as long as you are using RCS and a named group, separate chats with the same name will occasionally be created.
You can safely ignore the problem and wait for the phone to recognize they are the same group. If you are annoyed by the multiple groups, there is a workaround.
Workaround to merge when you have multiple groups with the same members:
On your iPhone, remove the names from both groups:
- At the top of each text thread, click on the group name.
- Choose Change name and photo
- Tap the Group Name
- Tap the "x" at the right of the field
- Click done
- slide your finger up from the bottom of the screen to get the apps
- put your finger on the Messages app and slide it to the top of screen