Contact name missing from text message since iOS 9 upgrade

Excellent, thanks jamenc, this worked for me on my wife's iPhone 4s which has had that problem since I upgraded to iOS 9 in December. Now she will stop moaning about it!

This worked for me, wow. Cheers.

This cured this problem for me for the time being. Mine only showed incoming text number, then the name matched up once you opened it, with previous conversations....but when I turned MMS off, then on, the name now shows if it's in my contacts. So it's odd, but it works for now. Luckily phone calls show contact names as usual.

Fantastic, this worked for me. Thanks Jamenc

I have been having the same issue since upgrading from ios8. Tried the MMS toggle off/on to no avail and then tried jamenc's trick with a number that I was having issues with. To my amazement it worked, however, I was just wondering if this fix was permanent (if I reset my phone using the home button and on/off switch, will the fix still be there?) and does it fix all the numbers that were giving issues or do I have to do the fix with each number individually?

BTW, it doesn't seem to have rectified the whatsapp issue. Strangely the contact that I have a problem with in whatsapp since the iOS update is OK in text messages and the ones that show only the number in the notification banner for texts are OK on whatsapp!

Am running iOS 9.1 on iPhone 6 (missed the 9.2 update and have heard that there are all sorts of problems with iOS 9.3)

I've been having the same issues with only a few contacts. It seems to be contacts who have iPhones and apple ID's but don't use iMessage but send texts instead. I've just turned my iMessage off and someone text me from their iPhone (not using iMessage) and it came up with their number. Previously showed their name. Turned iMessage back on it shows their name again. Seems to be a link with iMessage and when people elect not to use it!

This worked - but not permanently for me. Seemed to be fixed for the contact I tried it with, but then once I restarted the phone to repeat the process for another contact, it had stopped working again... argh.

Have just posted this fix to the other thread on this topic. Hope it works for others:

I've had this problem for a while on a 5S and tried various fixes. The oddest thing was that old contacts kept reappearing after a sync with Outlook even though I had previously deleted them.

So that go me thinking about where the contact information was coming from (not using iCloud) and Whatsapp appears to be the answer. Or at least my answer.

When you install this it seems to take a copy of your contacts into the app and after a time (with people changing numbers) it is no longer in sync with your iPhone contacts. So you end up with old phone numbers in Whatsapp conflicting with newer ones in the iPhone directory, confusing your phone so that it defaults to displaying the number only.

My fix was simply to turn off Whatsapp's access to contacts (settings, whatsapp, contacts) and that was it. Fixed.

Have now turned contacts back on and everything is still working...

I had contacts syncing through exchange. iCloud contacts was also turned on. I toggled off iCloud contacts, opted to keep them on the phone (not delete), and all the names returned to iMessage texts. It seems there was only one contact in iCloud and because it was toggled on this was the only library that was being checked. Even when I turned iCloud contact toggle back on and merged the contacts the names remained in iMessage. My advice if you are getting contacts from another source is to toggle off iCloud contacts.

thank you thank you, dfortuno. you had the fix for me!!

Ahhhhhhhhhh! This is actually driving me insane.

Nothing seems to work for me.

I've tried-

toggling the iCloud contacts on/off,

Deleting contacts from phone, from iCloud, from everything and manually re-entering numbers,

Deleting contacts from everywhere and importing from a VCard,

Turning off/on contact access to Whatsapp,

Turning off/on MMS,

Signing in and out of iCloud.

ios 10.1 notes vaguely mention a bug fix related to contact names in messages:

Messages

Fixes an issue that could lead to contact names appearing incorrectly in Messages

Perhaps try upgrading.

Sorry I should have mentioned, I'm on iOS 10.1. I've even upgraded iPhone since this issue started. I'm guessing this is some kinda bug in my iCloud But the last thing I want to ever do is start a new account.

I had come to the conclusion that the icloud fix was related to simultaneouslt having an Microsoft Exchange account syncing contacts, as the other fixes described earlier did not work, but turning off icloud instantly did. I assumed some kind of conflict in the contact look-up function. Seems situational.....

dfortuno's advice helped me but I neglected to mention that I think a big part of my problem was that i was operating at MAX STORAGE CAPACITY, so -- I'm assuming -- my 16GB iPhone had no room to update itself. (In fact an iTunes sync attempt said I was running at over capacity actually, if that's even possible.) I was having problems with no names on txt messages after an iOS update and my calendar events were not syncing either. Once I deleted a bunch of app and following dfortuno's suggestion (and another fix for my calendar sync) I got it all working again.

Hope this helps y'all.