Message from a individual contact being received as a Group Chat on my iPhone

I am having this exact same issue. In my case my girlfriend changed her phone number. I had both the old number and the new number in my phone and it has correctly "merged" the iMessages from her old number and the iMessages from her new number into one. She has completely removed the old number from her phone and is only using the new number.

However, any time I get a notification for a new iMessage from her it shows "Maybe: Her Name", "To: You & Her Name" with the double photo from her contact.

So, not only am I getting the bug where a single chat is seemingly being considered a group chat as far as notifications go. I am also getting "Maybe" when her contact details are correctly in her contact card.

This issue only seems to exist on my iPhone running iOS 18.0.1 - my Macbook just shows her name as normal.

It is driving me crazy.

I spent about 6 hours on the phone to Apple support and they assured me that all the logs etc from our troubleshooting have been escalated to iOS dev engineers for a future fix. She said they basically have no idea why it is happening but they are actively working on the problem to include a fix in a future release. She couldn't give me a time frame on it.

I have also just realised that this is causing read receipts to my girlfriend to not be sent. Despite them obviously and always being on in the message specific settings.

I think I have managed to find a solution this problem without wiping your entire phone.

Go to Settings > General > (scroll to the bottom) > Transfer or Reset iPhone > Select Reset > Tap Reset Network Settings.

This will wipe things like Wifi Passwords, reset mobile hotspot, mess with some focus home screens, but does not reset apps etc.

So far the issue above seems to be solved using this method. It also fixed the issue with read receipts not being sent.

I had this exact issue with a single contact (my husband) since updating to ios 18 on my iPhone 14 Pro. I had to have my phone replaced recently due to the back being cracked, and I wanted to share that the issue is resolved with my replacement 14 pro

Ok guys. After trying a million things, I think I have finally have a workaround for this.

1) Ensure the person who you have this iMessage problem with has an email address associated with their Apple ID and it is active for replying to iMessages in Settings > Apps > iMessage

2) Go to their Contact Card, long press [Message], select their email address

3) Send a message, which in my case then started a new iMessage thread separate from the old one

4) Delete the contact card entirely, but do not delete any messages.

5) Restart your phone

6) After phone is restarted ensure that the two iMessage threads (the one with the number, and the new one with the email) just show the number and email address and not their name. This confirms that you have no other contact card with their details in it.

7) Recreate their contact card, but ONLY put their email address into it. This should then reflect on the iMessage email thread to show their name.

8) Go back into the contact card and add their number, this should then merge the two iMessage threads.

9) From the contact card, select [Message] and again select their email address, send an iMessage from here.

This should now mean that the last message you sent to them is to their email. This will then force their iMessage to reply from their email instead of their number, and thus workaround the problem.

If at any time you start a new message to their number, or they start a new message from their number. E.g, sharing something from an app etc, then this will break the above and the problem will return. To fix this simply go back to step 9 and "restart" the iMessage thread to their email.

Please LMK if this works for you.

The issue with this is I have never used their email to message them. I use their email to share a calendar, but in terms of messaging and calling, there's no reason it should be forcing me to use the email. Now what differs in my situation is that no matter how many times i remove the email from the contact, it will keep showing the contacts name and if i message the contacts number AFTER removing the email, it will send through the email chat but not through the number. This is extremely frustrating especially since the last time i had this issue with another contact, i had to reset my entire phone. Apple needs to fix this because i shouldnt have to keep going out of my way to fix a $1200 phone for a bug they've constantly had for years. Even with me contacting apple support, she knew about the issue and said it was happening constantly, but ios 18.2 didnt fix anything, and now it feels more like they just don't care about their consumer base. She literally said theres was nothing else that could be done...except factory reset the phone. Which I've done 4 times in the past week. :)

"Hey, spend $1000+ on a phone (and $20 on a charger block🤭), and we'll ignore any issues we don't deem important😃👍"

Possible Fix to this Problem

I also had a contact message become "Maybe: Name" to "You & Name" because of their iCloud email and their phone number.

The solution that has worked for me so far is to create a second contact card with that person's iCloud email address and then add their phone number. Then link those contacts together (the original one and their new one). Apple should recognize these as duplicates in your Contacts app or Phone app (under the Contacts tabs). Click view duplicates and merge the two contact cards together, which has resolved this issue for me.

Hey guys. For those of you having the same bug, please report it here - Feedback - iPhone - Apple

This happened to me too and of all the contacts it is with my wife. I have AT&T she has T-Mobile. HELP!!

Unfortunately this fix seemed to be temporary and the issues came back :(

This is an on going issue in ios 18.2.

Does apple have a ETA for fix? It is very annoying.

Literally thank you! It didn’t work exactly how you described but it’s sending as the saved contact now