Messages in Textra dont match stock app

[lkwest]

Hello all,

Ive been using Textra for about 10 years on various Samsung phones. No issues until now. I had an A71 and yesterday I bought a S21. In the process of trying to switch my text messages over to my new phone, I realized that, on my old phone, the messages in the samsung stock messaging app dont match Textra. They are totally jumbled... messages missing, texts with person A are appearing in person B's chat log, group texts are missing, etc. But in Textra all the texts are normal.

Im hoping to fix this on my old phone so that I can transfer them to my new phone.

 

[suzolin13]

I had a similar situation a couple of years ago when I upgraded to my S21 Ultra...there was no fix & I ultimately gave up

 

[mustang7757]

Best thing to do when you switch between devices is go back to stock message app and let the transfer happen with that , the system doesn't look at 3rd party messages to complete the transfer , then go back to your 3rd party message app.
Another thing make backups periodically to Smart switch on PC that way you can restore messages or lot of other things any time.

 

[lkwest]

Best thing to do when you switch between devices is go back to stock message app and let the transfer happen with that , the system doesn't look at 3rd party messages to complete the transfer , then go back to your 3rd party message app.
Another thing make backups periodically to Smart switch on PC that way you can restore messages or lot of other things any time.

Yes but its the stock messaging app (on the old phone) that has the jumbled messages, while the messages in Textra (on the old phone) are normal. Does that make sense?

 

[mustang7757]

Yes but its the stock messaging app (on the old phone) that has the jumbled messages, while the messages in Textra (on the old phone) are normal. Does that make sense?

The way that can happen if you been on Textra for awhile then switched to stock message app it might take a few to sync everything up, what you can do is set it as you default message app wait about 20 minutes if it didn't sync up try force stop and wait couple minutes if it still hasn't then clear it's data then force stop this should correct it

 

[lkwest]

Hmm tried this, didnt help.

 

[mustang7757]

Wait a day or 2 on the stock message app since doing that and see if it's corrected

 

[suzolin13]

I vaguely remember when I tried several transfer methods, my old phone had no problem syncing from textra to the stock messaging app - I went back & forth a few times & everything was fine on the old phone. It was only on the new phone that the messages were all jumbled. It didn't matter whether I did smart switch with all the messages in textra or the stock app. I think I even deleted textra from my old phone & had the same problem when I moved everything to the new one. It was really frustrating...

 

[KayeDee]

This happened to me too. Thanks to this and another thread I was able to get them back with SMS Backup & Restore.

Basically:
- back up messages
- delete the Unknown Sender thread
- restore messages

I wasn't confident, so I went through a slightly longer process.

I was using textra and I lost names on messages
1. When I swapped phones
2. When I swapped from textra to Google messages on the new phone a year later

To get them back I:
1. Downloaded SMS Backup & Restore
2. Backed up messages using SMS Backup & Restore (I did this to the cloud, but then I had to down load the file to restore)
3. Opened messages in Google messages, archived the "Unknown sender" thread
4. Restored messages (it said 1 message was restored)
- That seemed to work to restore the "Unknown Sender" messages from the old phone to the correct contacts (so the info must have still been there somehow, as the backup was from the new phone). I found the messages all in archives, now in multiple threads. But the 'Unknown Sender' messages since changing phones were still showing as Unknown Sender (even though when I swapped back to textra those ones were showing correctly). (I unarchived the rest)
5. I then deleted all messages in the current Unknown Sender thread
6. And I restored messages from my previous back up (I did not back up again, just used the same one) (it said 500+ messages were restored)
- This seems to have restored all messages to the correct contacts! I no longer have any showing as Unknown Sender, and the few I knew about to check are all there.

I won't be using Textra again