Your Phone app shows duplicate sent messages

My suspicion is that this problem is with the Android OS, not the Windows App, which is why Microsoft is quiet about it.

Before trying the Your Phone app, I tried PushBullet, which is a non-microsoft product.  It has similar features, where you can text from your desktop, etc.

It exhibited the same spurious duplicate text issues.  In fact, those duplicate text issues were why I uninstalled Pushbullet and tried "Your Phone" in the first place.

I suspect that the reason some of those other apps worked (ie: samsung flow, google messages, etc) is because they install a replacement messaging app, which is tightly integrated with their PC messaging client.

In the case of PushBullet and "Your Phone", they just try and piggy-back onto whatever existing messaging app is there, using the core OS facilities for doing so, and that's where the issues arise.

Just my two cents.

I know longer have any issues with duplicate texts on phone. I've had wifi enabled for probably a month now with no duplication.

 I had some major problems with Bluetooth on laptop which frankly I attribute to Your Phone as it uses Bluetooth connectivity in some fashion to link the two devices.

KEEP AN EYE ON YOUR BLUETOOTH ON COMPUTER!!

I've been fighting with this problem since I upgraded to my Galaxy Note 10.  Before that, I was using Your Phone happily for many months on my S7.  I believe I finally isolated the difference.  I can now switch the problem on and off reliably, with 100% repeatability.  

The solution is simple, but fixing it on the back-end may not be.  I'm using the default Samsung Messages app on my phone.  Not because it's my preference, but because it works properly with my Galaxy Watch, and it's not significantly different from Google Messages (which I prefer).  That said, my Note 10 came with AT&T's Messages Backup & Sync feature enabled.  That appears to be the culprit, and while it's specific to AT&T, I'd bet other carriers have something similar.

I did NOT have that feature on my S7 (AT&T said it was too old and didn't support it - suspicious in and of itself).  Once I realized the problem started when I switched phones, it allowed me to start to narrow my search down.  I finally came across that and recalled that it explicitly wasn't enabled on my old phone. 

Flipping that service on/off toggles the duplicate message process on/off as well.

Here's my theory.  That service appears to be a real-time sync service that backs up the phone's message data.  My bet is that Your Phone's method of interacting with the phone's message data and the Backup & Sync service's method are ending up conflicting in some way, and duplicating data on the phone.  The actual outgoing message isn't duplicated - at least not in my experience (I've asked recipients many times).  It's just the data as seen on the phone - and therefore in Your Phone which appears to be reading/writing to that data on the phone.  It tells me that Your Phone is talking to the phone's message data service in a way that isn't actually going out to the carrier's messaging service - and so is Backup & Sync.

Just a theory, but what I KNOW is I can turn the problem on/off like a switch now.

Until this is addressed, I've switched to using SMS Backup & Restore to backup my messaging data.  It's not a real-time service, it's a scheduled backup, and unfortunately it doesn't do RCS messages when used with Samsung Messages.  I'll look more into that later today.  I hope this helps others out there.

Jeff A.

Portland Oregon

I've been able to resolve this issue on my phone by replacing the default Android "Messages" app, with the Google "Messages" app and setting it as my default messaging app.  (Yeah, it was pretty confusing when installing: "Do you want to replace Messages with Messages?"...)

So far, I haven't had any problems with duplicated messages since doing this.  

I'll keep my fingers crossed...

Hi --

You may be right, and that wasn't something I'd considered, before.  However, you mentioned that Microsoft is being quiet because the problem isn't with their app, and I tend to disagree with that: If they know that they're not at fault, I'd think that they'd happily point the finger at the known issue (i.e., the OS), so that they can stop being blamed for it.

It's somewhat of a moot point, though; right now, we need to use both the OS and the app, and the only thing we know with certainty is that the problem persists.