App becomes unresponsive (black screen) when selecting conversation

[ericjs]

I've repeatedly encountered the following behavior: I'll bring up SMS Messenger, and from the view that lists conversations (those with most recent activity first), select a conversation (it doesn't seem to matter which one). I will then get a black screen while the whole phone becomes unresponsive. Sometimes the phone will give me the prompt to wait or kill the app. If I kill the app by any means (such as Force stop) and open the app again, the same thing will happen. It seems like only restarting the phone lets be get back into one of the conversations. I've tried waiting multiple minutes for the app to respond, without luck.

Today I tried something a little different. It occured to me that perhaps something was going on in the conversations list view that was not finished when I try to open a conversation. After getting that black screen and then killing the app, I tried scrolling all the way to the bottom of the conversations list first...there seemed to be something odd going on because the system ui was being sluggish to respond...I could not get the system buttons (home, etc) to appear, and after waiting some time, I got that dialog from the system about "System UI being unresponsive with the options to wait or kill it. I waited, and after waiting many minutes it seemed to clear up, and I was able to select a conversation without a problem.

Is there some task that starts (or can start) when you open the conversation list screen? Maybe something that runs through all your data? (I do have many years of conversation history on my phone).

(Version 5.17.2 running on android 8.0.0)