Bug: iOS Message.app treats redirected me.com and icloud.com synonyms as different conversations

It took me ages to figure out what was going wrong.

My iMessage conversations with the kids were split into two threads, even though Contacts.app only knew of one person.

Turns out the problem was the old me.com and iCloud.com split.

Years ago Apple migrated its cloud services from an email of me.com to one of iCloud.com. They implemented a redirect, but I’ve come to suspect that the “real” address is still me.com. Or rather that on some Apple backends it’s me.com and some it’s iCloud.com. Turns out the same messiness applies to Message.app and iMessage.

iMessage/Message.app doesn’t know about this redirection. It doesn’t know iCloud.com and me.com are synonyms. So a thread that references daughter@icloud.com is separate from one that references daughter@me.com.

The workaround is to put both the me.com and iCloud.com addresses into the contact. It’s a pain of course, you don’t want to do this for every person you know. I’m doing it now for the kids.

I suspect this is a very hard bug to fix.

Facebook won't use iPhone settings account? A fix.

After a Facebook password change, especially if it forces logout from other devices, you may find that Facebook.app on iOS no longer reads authentication information gfrom the iOS Settings:Facebook configuration.

You can always enter your username and password in Facebook.app, but that’s not very elegant.

Here’s how to get Facebook.app to use the account you defined in Settings:Facebook.

1. Ensure Facebook.app is installed but not running.
2. In Settings:Facebook completely delete existing account. It doesn’t work to enter the new password there, Facebook still won’t “see” the authentication information.
3. Recreate accounts in Settings:Facebook.
4. Launch Facebook.app. it should show the name of the account in Settings:Facebook and you can use that.