Text message notifications on iOS 9 not recognising contacts

I wasn't happy either tbh, it's a workaround method, not an apple fix but I was more annoyed with the instances of not knowing who was texting in the lock screen. You have to weigh up your annoyance vs the likelihood of this being recognised and fixed by Apple. I've already logged with them my issue with the bug, hopefully others have done too.

Am I right in thinking that you guys all have contacts saved outside of iCloud?

I've literally just tested my theory - that my contacts who were saved on my iCloud (my girlfriend for instance) are recognised. Of course majority of my contacts came from Google, that I've built up over the last 15 years, so I'm not particularly happy about this...

How I noticed the problem:

I was just setting up a new user account on my laptop for work, and whilst syncing my iCloud account, it pulled only some of my contacts (most recent ones form the past year or two) - and the message app on the Mac was showing numbers instead of names - therefore isolating the problem for me.

This seems to be Apple's way of forcing us into purely using their eco-system, and a f**k you to anyone who's ever used competing company's services... Nice way to screw with your customers as usual Apple, but of course we're stuck as paying customers...

I'm not sure… some of the people whose names aren't showing on my phone notifications are already iCloud contacts

Have now logged this at http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

Suggest everyone does the same...

Just had 3 text messages from the same person: the first came through as their name, the next two as their number. This is a very random problem. And the texts came from an iPhone. Checking them on the Message app on my Mac shows that the second two were SMS messages. I think the first was an iMessage. No further updates otherwise.

I was happy to see iOS 9.1 come out last night as I assumed it would address this problem. It hasn't. So far I have tried:

• Reset and restore of phone
• Turning off contacts in iCloud, deleting contacts from my phone and then restoring the contacts from iCloud
• Deleting whole message histories for affected contacts
• Deleting affected contacts and adding as new
• The whole business of turning off iMessage and making a FaceTime call
• Fiddling with the Dial Assist setting
• Resetting network settings
• Probably some other things involving pig entrails and full moons

None of the above worked (although the dog enjoyed the pig entrails) and certain contacts remain affected. They are a mix of iMessage and SMS message strings, with no apparent pattern (that I could be bothered to deduce).

I'm not forking out £25 for a single incident help call.

Where on earth does this leave me? On the plus side I'm getting better at recognising my Mum's phone number in notifications.

Add me to the list of people experiencing this issue following the update to iOS 9. I have an iPhone 6 and last night updated to 9.1, but still have texts alerts showing on the lock screen with only the number, not the contact name. For me it seems to be limited to standard text messages, and not iMessages though my mum’s name seems to show up fine regardless of whether she texts from her android or her iPad. Needless to say I’ve tried the various fixes suggested with no luck.

I have submitted a feedback report to Apple, but given the lack of resolution despite it being 6 weeks and 3 updates, I’m not confident of this being fixed any time soon.

So this might be interesting. I've noticed the numbers that aren't recognised are in this format in the notifications: +XXXXXXXXXXXX whereas on the contact the formatting is forced to look like this +XX XXXX XXXXXX.

I checked this with one of my working contacts by deleting their number from their contact and getting them to send a message. In the notification from that person the format in the notification was +XX XXXX XXXXXX.

So is there a problem with iOS identifying the different ways of displaying the same number based on how it is sent by the network?

Certainly seems odd to me.

At least you may of found a pattern, which is more than can be said for the boffins at Apple 🙂..

I went in to Carphone Warehouse to have a look at the new Google Nexus phone as I'm so sick of this issue. The guy in there advised that some Android phones were having the same problem with text message notifications! Obviously not connected to the iOS9 issue, but it shows it's not just Apple... A colleague who is an Android devotee also advised that since upgrading the operating system on his Samsung S4 it keeps crashing. It looks as though smartphones are just becoming a bit too smart - hence all the bugs and issues. It does, however, look as though Apple are prioritising the fixes: 9.0.1 and 9.0.2 were clearly patches to deal with issues that prevented phones from working; 9.1 fixes a number of bigger issues too - the grey bar that appeared when sending an audio message (I clicked on it accidentally a couple of times) could only be deleted by turning the phone off and on again, otherwise it permanently blocked what you were trying to type in a text message. This thread has now had over 10,000 views and a lot of comments, so this particular issue is clearly affecting many, many people. Therefore Apple must be aware of it (a lot of us have reported it to them, too) so I hold out faint hope that Apple will get round to fixing it - just as soon as they've fixed all those even bigger bugs...! I suppose we'll see...

i had the very same problem but with one number in specific, the one which texts me the most.

after trying everything found on line, speaking to Apple (less than helpful) and almost completely resetting my phone to factory i thought i'd look at the phone of the contact who's number wasn't showing.

I set their number to 'My info' within mail, messaging and anywhere else i could find it and problem solved !!!

No more missing info. Hope this helps.

So I just took the plunge and upgraded to iOS 9.1. Still had the issue of the contact name not showing on message. The way I fixed it after trying all the other options was to fully delete the message thread. And then when I got a new message from that number it had fixed it. Not an ideal fix as not great to have to delete a whole message thread but Apple have not fixed it so what can you do.

I tried deleting the whole message thread but sadly it made no difference, the contact still only shows as a number when a new message is sent to me!?

Yep - add me to the list please!

hardly ever trawl the apple forums but this is a particularly strange and annoying issue! Glad to see its affecting lots of people.

Does anyone know of anybody who's upgraded to iOS9 who DOESN'T have this problem??

assume it's just a bit of buggy SW which will get fixed when Apple realise there's a lot of unhappy & frustrated customers! Please add to this thread if you've experienced this problem!

dear techies@apple:

please take note of the number of people here having this issue!!

Like everyone on this thread my in and I are having the same issue. We updated to iOS 9.2 in the hope it would the issue, but no. One of my contacts was fine then suddenly iPhone decided not to recognise the number it's annoying as I have assigned different times to my contacts so I have an idea of who is calling or texting me! I've tried resetting etc all to no avail, I even called Apple Support and they agreed it needs to be in an update to fix. With over 12000 vie you would think they would fix it with iOS 9.2.1?