RCS connected messages in IMessage issue
I used to have a pixel 7 pro. My son has a one plus 9. My wife has an iPhone 14. When apple started allowing RCS to be used in iMessage, we started having an issue where my wife would send a message to me, but it would go to my son’s phone instead and I wouldn’t get the message. But it was sporadic and hit or miss, and we couldn’t figure out what caused it. My son and I don’t show up as linked contacts in her phone, we have different phone numbers, but the issue persisted. My pixel 7 broke recently, so on an attempt to solve the issue, I got an iPhone 15 pro. The thinking was if this should make messaging easier since I and her would both be on iMessage, my son would be android/RCS and all would be right with the world. But it’s not! the issue continues to happen!
What we have been able to decipher is that my wife’s iPhone has somehow merged conversations. If my wife sends a message to my son’s phone, he receives the message just fine. When he responds, iMessage shows the blue dot for a new message next to his name and conversation, but his response shows up in the conversation in iMessage between me and my wife as if I had responded. We tried to delete the conversation between myself and my wife on her phone, but when we click “delete” the conversation won’t delete. It stays in the list of conversations. But if we delete the conversation between my wife and my son, then it deletes both conversations (the one between me and my wife, and also the one between my wife and my son). After messing around some more, it appears that, for some reason, my wife’s phone recognizes RCS messages from my sons phone as RCS messages coming from my phone number. We tried to delete both myself and my son from her contacts and then add ourselves again, but that didn’t fix the issue. We then tried to turn off RCS messaging on my wife’s phone, but when we do that, she doesn’t receive any text messages my son sends to her. When my wife toggles RCS back on, the next time my son sends her a message, all of his previous messages come through, but once again, they come through to my wife’s phone as if I had sent them from my number and in a conversation between myself and my wife and not from my son. All I can deduce is that, for some reason, my wife’s phone recognizes and treats RCS messages received from my son as if they are being received from me (she sees them as green bubbles in our conversation). If I send her a message from my iPhone now, that shows up as a blue bubble conversation to her. Either way, it’s super frustrating and annoying, and there has to be a fix, but we have tried pretty much everything and nothing has worked (restarting phone, deleting messages, deleting contacts, turning RCS off and on). Has anyone else come across this issue and figured out how to fix it?
iPhone 15 Pro, iOS 18