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Probably a @PatrThom question:

We got my wife a new iPhone SE to replace her dead iPhone 6. Set it up & tested it. Worked fine. This morning I tried to send her a text and she never answered. Sent her a Facebook message and she answered right away. Turns out Apple thinks we are sharing a messenger account and just puts both sides of a conversation on the same side. Yes, she logs in as me so when we spend money it comes out of my account. But here’s the rub. Her OLD iPhone did it the same way with no problems. So why is this doing this now and what can we do to fix it?

Maybe make sure the phone is set to sync messages to iCloud. You can also give her her own Apple ID, have her join a family with you, and you can still share payment information.

Don’t use iCloud. Not paying Apple any more than I have to. But I’ll look at the family thing.

Still, it worked before with the same setup flawlessly. No idea why this is doing this now.

Even weirder, it changed MY phone to say Kerri Nihsen on Messenger! What?!?

iCloud is free up to a storage limit. If you don’t want to worry about hitting that limit, just don’t have it sync your photos.

She probably updated the name when she set up the new phone. Also, with family sharing you’ll still both be able to share your app purchases, as long as the developer allows it.

Dave said:

Don’t use iCloud. Not paying Apple any more than I have to. But I’ll look at the family thing.

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If you're using apple devices I don't think you're going to have much choice

Right? I have no preference other than “phone work good have good game apps”. And was cheap to buy.

I think there’s a way to set it to not use iMessage at all, and it could actually be the contact on your phone that got updated to use that instead of the number. Either way, I think it’d be easiest to just get her her own id and use family sharing. Otherwise the same thing will probably keep happening.

Yeah what happened was that her contacts disappeared so I followed the directions to fix that. The answer had me merge iCloud and that’s what’s causing THIS issue.

I’m going to give her her own login. I just need to find out if she had any apps that she paid anything for, as this would invalidate them.

Dave said:

Yeah what happened was that her contacts disappeared so I followed the directions to fix that. The answer had me merge iCloud and that’s what’s causing THIS issue.

I’m going to give her her own login. I just need to find out if she had any apps that she paid anything for, as this would invalidate them.

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If she was using your login to purchase them, and you use family sharing, she might still be able to get them with her new login.

Dave said:

Even weirder, it changed MY phone to say Kerri Nihsen on Messenger! What?!?

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You need to give her her own login. Full stop.
You can join them together as a family later if you want, but each person NEEDS to have their own ID or else you are just asking for trouble later. Also don't forget the password you set up or else you might never get back into that account (and all the stuff you ever bought with it).
Sharing Apple IDs isn't like sharing a Netflix account. If you're signed in on multiple devices then Apple will assume those devices all belong to YOU and mix everything together since of course you want everything everywhere. Oh you deleted a contact? Ok now it's gone from everywhere.

--Patrick

We’ve had her old phone and my phone on the same account for years with no problems. I know it’s possible.

Dave said:

I know it’s possible.

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it is definitely possible.
It is also a fiddly pain in the ass to manage if you want to do it that way.
But I won’t stop you.
(I mean, it’s not like I could anyway. You live, like, 650mi/1080km away)

—Patrick

Logged us both out of iMessage. Boom. Fixed.

Dave said:

Logged us both out of iMessage. Boom. Fixed.

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But oh no, now all your text messages will be (gasp) old-people green.

—Patrick

I don’t even respond to green.

I guess do what fits you. Personally I like knowing that I can lose or destroy my phone, and all I need to do is sign into my new phone and everything will be there. I’m a lot more comfortable with Apple storing my data than a company like google or FB, so it works for me.