Messaging app on brand new phone keeps crashing?

[user_of_a_phone]

Hi everyone!

I recently made the switch from an iPhone to a Galaxy S4 mini. Everything is working find except for the messaging app. I imported all of my messages from my iPhone over (around 36,000), but the app pretty much crashes every time I use it. If I can open the app at all, it will usually let me send one text before crashing and I usually have to restart the phone to be able to fully open the app again.
I deleted a few threads and messages that were unimportant, and the app seemed to work slightly better (as in maybe I can send two text messages now if I'm lucky), but obviously, I want it to work without crashing at all.

As a digital hoarder, I'd prefer to keep all or most of my messages / wouldn't want to spend the time to leaf through all 35000 or so remaining messages to pick out the ones I want to keep from the ones I can part with if I can avoid it.

Any suggestions?

I tried switching over to hangouts, but I wasn't able to delete any messages or send any messages while using hangouts, so either I'm doing something wrong or it's just not working.

Thanks!

 

[user_of_a_phone]

So, with Android, it's impossible to store that many messages?