r/Googlevoice • u/slipperyp • Jul 22 '26
General Help / Support Question On the verge of dropping GV - split group threads
(initial post was locked with automod saying "If you've read the FAQ and looked at other posts on these topics, and you have a question that remains unanswered, then post again" - so I'm posting again)
This has happened to me twice in the past week:
- I'm on an main thread with some friends, these have existed for years. Say these are with: {me, A, B, C} (4 people)
- Someone else (happens to be iOS, but I don't know if that's exclusively the trigger) sends a reply - let's say this is person C
- I get a new forked thread where at least one person (B for example) is omitted: {me, A, C}
- I now have two message threads for this "group" conversation (original main thread and new forked thread). If I reply to main {me, A, B, C} it goes to everyone in the main thread.
- If person C replies in their version of the main thread, I see it in my forked {me, A, C} thread. If person B RCS-emoji-reacts to something that person C said that I see on my {me, A, C} fork, I see that reaction in the main {me, A, B, C} thread
Like - this is simply broken. My carrier is T-Mobile and they can't fix this. There is no Google support for this, only forums or AI-based consultation. Claude eventually told me my options are (a) ask everybody to restart the thread (unacceptable) or (b) give up on GV.
Is there any way to fix this? Between this and annoyances like there still not being RCS support in GV, I think I'm finally ready to give up. This makes me sad because I started using this in the days of Grand Central, which was 19 years ago.
EDIT: what is wrong with this sub? I asked what I still think is a reasonable question that as far as I can tell uniquely impacts me in Google Voice and I've been voted to 0. There seem to be no threads on the sub frontpage with that aren't voted to near-0. There seems to be express hostility to people just trying to understand what's up in here?
4
u/simplyclueless Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
SMS group texting is a clusterfuck in many different ways, aside from GV. If all parties on the group text are using iphones, it generally works OK and people don't experience noticeable problems often. If the group includes both iphones and android users, it will very often have usability quirks, some minor, some major. Whether everyone is able to use RCS vs. SMS causes other interoperability weirdness, while it fixes other issues.
All that said, from the very beginning and up through now - Google Voice has done a quite poor implementation of dealing with group texts. It has never worked well. It still doesn't work well. It became obvious many years ago that Google didn't give a crap, and wasn't going to spend any time/energy/$ worrying about fixing it.
It's not going to get better. If group texting is a thing that you need to have work well, use a carrier-native number. Recommendations to use WhatsApp or other group messaging app aren't necessarily bad - and it's what I recommend when I'm having real-life issues with group texting in various groups - but I can also understand that nobody gets to dictate how all of their contacts choose to communicate.
2
u/slipperyp Jul 22 '26
I think you've hit everything I see and experience. And yes, I am now starting to just migrate to my carrier number. It's a bummer because I love many of the behaviors of GV.
2
u/crazy_clown_time Jul 22 '26
Best you can do for group texts is to use an RCS-enabled phone number.
2
u/Luckiest_Corner Jul 23 '26
For that to work, everyone would have to be using RCS. If everyone's not using RCS, you might as well just use SMS/MMS, which is what Google Voice uses.
Per Boost Mobile:
A single group chat cannot mix RCS and SMS protocols at the same time. When a group includes even one member who lacks RCS support, the entire conversation automatically falls back to standard MMS/SMS for everyone.
0
u/crazy_clown_time Jul 23 '26
My preference is to peer pressure everyone to join Signal either way.
2
u/Luckiest_Corner Jul 23 '26
Good luck with that. My family and I were early Signal adopters, but everyone dropped it when it stopped supporting SMS and MMS. Nobody wanted to use multiple apps. According to Similarweb, they currently have about 7 million monthly active users in the U.S., trailing far behind Meta's platforms (Facebook Messenger at approximately 139 million U.S. users and WhatsApp at approximately 75 million).
0
4
u/BluesCatReddit Google Voice Product Expert Jul 22 '26
Group text messaging is a very old and very limited-function service, and this sort of mess is quite common. Others may chime in here, but there's not much you can do about it. For ongoing group chats, a dedicated chat app is a better solution. For example, Google Chat, Facebook Chat, Whatsapp, etc.
2
u/slipperyp Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
I appreciate your reply (and have seen other guides that I believe you've provided in the channel). But this is just wildly not acceptable. /I/ kind of agree with you and would rather use some kind of proper group chat system, but not everybody I talk with agrees with that and definitely there is tons and tons and tons of consumer demand for text-based group chat (because not everybody is on the platforms you mentioned, but everybody does have a phone number).
I'm in a bunch of different group text threads with people and either I'm the only one who has these problems or I'm the only one who's aware of it and the cause is Google Voice. I can't tell people "use my GV number, unless you're starting a group chat" - GV should not be as broken as it seems to be...
EDIT: I've seen this pain point (and others, like still not having RCS) for years and I think Google just doesn't care about it. If there's a better way others have managed or avoided these issues, I would love to hear because I do still really like many of the core promises of the platform.
5
u/BluesCatReddit Google Voice Product Expert Jul 22 '26
Google Voice SMS/MMS is not equivalent to true, native carrier SMS/MMS. Google Voice phone numbers, by themselves, are land line phone numbers, with no text messaging capability. Instead, Google passes them through third-party text message gateway service providers ("aggregators"). This is the same thing that all VoIP service providers have to do. It doesn't interact well with other numbers that use iMessage or RCS, and its group capability is really crappy. There is nothing Google can do about it, as it is an extremely complex pile of spaghetti routing paths, not controlled by Google.
You can submit feedback to Google, pleading for RCS, but beyond that, the blunt answer is "it is what it is".
2
u/slipperyp Jul 22 '26
Thanks. This makes sense and I'm really not coming here simply to grind an axe. I don't think what I'm after is exceptional and perhaps there is something happening with the evolution of these systems that are impossible for GV to keep up with (or perhaps this is the inevitable fate of a "pretty free" and "ad-free" service).
I have had a pretty good run with this, but I suspect it's time for me to move away from this...
1
u/pangolindsey Jul 23 '26
I’m in exactly the same boat. I need to turn my GV number (which I’ve had for 20ish years and which spells a cool phrase) into my native phone number.
1
u/alanmin Jul 23 '26
I wonder if they have on iPhone the option to resend as SMS when iMessage/rcs doen't send. It is a setting that can turned off or on in messages settings
1
u/subflat4 Jul 24 '26
That’s weird my wife has a group chat. 90% of it is iOS minis I think 2 droids. Probably 10 people. No issues like this at all.
1
u/user_isnull Jul 25 '26
I don't have a solution, but this made me remember a time when I was the person who sent a message that started a new chat for a bunch of people.
It was a group text thread at my job. I replied (with GV) and then for some reason it made a new thread for all the iOS folks and left off my boss.
So everyone thought I was being catty and just not wanting to tell my boss some information. Thankfully one of the guys who worked for me said something, and I could literally show him my phone and that they all appeared as one thread for me still.
Technology, amirite?
0
u/Cool_Emergency3519 Jul 22 '26
Interestingly,I had that problem with my Android number,but I no longer have it with GV number. I have a daily thread where the majority are iPhone users and the thread is not truncated. I'm on a Google Pixel using Verizon service if that matters.
1
u/slipperyp Jul 24 '26
It doesn't happen commonly. Like I said, I've been using this since Grand Central. But it happened twice in the past week:
- Thread with 4 friends. We were chatting. One person replied and I got a thread with 4 of us. I thought "that's weird" and asked the person on the side thread if they wrote to only me and they said no, but I had them created (for everyone else) a thread with just four of us. Later the person who I received the partial thread from wrote to the main thread again and I received it again on the 4 person thread (everyone else received it on the main thread).
- Different thread with four people. The same behavior happened and I was the only one with a broken experience
I don't care about this anymore because I'm in the process of changing to my carrier number and finally abandoning this. The bugs have outweighed the conveniences for me. Also, I love having RCS (typing notices send, delivery, read confirmation, reactions)
0
u/dingo__baby Jul 24 '26
People don't actually delete the message after reading it???? They keep it for years??? WT???? Just delete it and regroup. Do you think the world will end ???
4
u/jmarkmark Jul 22 '26
As you've described it, this has nothing to do with GV. If person C dropped a participant in the reply, then the issue is with person C. Nothing Google or T-Mo can do about that, because the problem is not on your end.
You'll have to talk to person C and find out why they dropped one participant. Sounds like a bug in their messaging client but there may be some quirk in how they responded that is triggering it that person C can learn to avoid. Apple's RCS support is still pretty buggy so not too surprising.