Text groups split into two entangled text groups
For several years teams within my organization have adopted text groups to quickly coordinate within a team. Some of the group members are using Androids. We give our groups names and an icon so that they stand out on the list of recent messages. It's worked very well for us.
Recently, however, I've had two of these groups do something bizarre that suggests an iOS bug. A named text group splits into two text groups, the named group and an unnamed clone of it. The clone has some but not all of the text history. Any group interaction is fragmented into two threads. Sometimes a new text in one group goes to both groups! The groups seem to be randomly entangled.
This problem might be easy to fix if there were an easy way to delete an entire text group for all participants. The recommended "Tap Leave this conversation" doesn't do this; the group is still there for everyone else.
Asking others to Leave this conversation may be a useful step toward group deletions, but when I do this the people who have left the group still appear as active members on the group profile page.
So, three questions:
- Is there a way to avoid a duplicate group showing up?
- How can we delete the duplicate group?
- More generally, how does one permanently delete a text group for all members?
(In case the reason no one can delete a group is that "you shouldn't be able to delete a group text on someone else's phone", I can explain why you should be able to do this. Group deletion is needed frequently: every time you need to add a new member or remove an existing member you have to create a whole new group to do it (at least, if Androids are involved). That wouldn't be a big deal, but since you can't permanently delete the previous group, you have to give it a name like "OLD GROUP! DO NOT USE!". Even if all of the group members want that old group to go away, no one, even the group creator, can delete it! Sounds like something Microsoft would do.)
iPhone 11, iOS 18.2.1
Windows
