iPhone messages not showing contact names

None of the above worked but I just got it fixed. (The numbers instead of names happened to me because I signed out and into icloud trying to fix something)

So I went to Settings > Contacts > Short Name and then turned the Short Name in this menu off, and looked at my messages and it was fixed, and then turned short name on again. (I also first played about with orders for the Sort Order and Display Order in Contacts before going to short name, not sure if this had an influence)

Close Messages completely and restart your phone.

Tap the home button twice to bring up the app multitasking screen. Swipe to find the Messages app and then swipe up on the preview window to close the app.

Restart your phone and then see what happens.

Diana.McCall wrote:

Hi dsewanee. Try making a trivial edit to one of your contacts. Then restart the device, power off, not just sleep.

That is exactly what worked for me very recently when I had to backup and re enter my contacts from an Exchange email account that I was losing at work.

I used a third party app from the App Store to backup and restore the contacts and then made a minor edit to one contact and all of the names reappeared rather than the phone numbers.

I had a similar issue occur after a migration from iPhone 6 to iPhone X. The settings were set a specific way under the iCloud settings for the iPhone 6 and it will transfer not just the data, but the settings too. When I logged off from my old device out of iCloud. The numbers on the messages for the iPhone X showed without names. Although the names and contacts were under the contacts app.

This is what I did. Settings > Name > iCloud > Contacts. Contacts were enabled. So I disabled. An re-enabled while selecting merge. This did the trick!

I tried restarting the phone, changing something minor in a contact, disabling/re-enabling MMS, and toggling Short Name setting for Contacts off and on with no luck. As soon as I changed one contact’s phone number (added +1), however, all the names came back to my Messages. Thanks @ApolloKpan!

no need to remove and re add contacts, and restart everything. Here it is.

General>Language & Region> Change region to your region,

mine me was set to America for some reason. Changed it to aus and fixed it. If it is set to your region change it to something else and back again.

Had the same trouble with the other options. I resolved by changing my default contacts from Exchange to iCloud and then switching it back. Everything reloaded correctly after that.

For my iphone 7 with some fairly heavy corporate device management, I had to use a variation of Stanners10 "Short Name" fix to get it to work. Go to: Setting > Contacts > Short Name. Then, select a different name format preference. Mine default was "first name & last initial" so I selected "first name only." That fixed the issue. I didn't have to toggle the Short Name off, just changing the name format worked for me. I was then able to revert back to my initial name format preference.

My problem of missing names replaced by phone numbers got fixed when I changed the entries in my contacts to the standard formula: + countrycode (areacode) phonenumber. Problem has occurred when some new numbers were added for the overseas contacts. After the correction all US numbers look like this: +1 (555) 555-1212 and the overseas numbers look like this: +49 555 111 222 for mobiles and +49 55 555 11 22 for the stationary numbers.

This is what worked for me. I was working on another issue where I signed in and out of iCloud on iPhone 7. Tried a number of turning things on & off. Making the simple edit to one anything in my contacts and restart restored everything in iMessage that had just a phone number rather than displaying the persons name. 😀

Go to Settings > Contacts > Short Name and change it to something else ('First Name Only' or 'Last Name Only'). Issue should be fixed by now. Revert the Short Name setting back to it's original value if you want.

I've had this issue for years? I never figured it out until now... not that I understand exactly what happened.

1. Tried all the toggling on and off of things.

2. synced icloud of contacts, imessage, and phone's icloud

3. deleted all contacts from "on my mac" to use only icloud

4. changed 1 contacts number ... I deleted the +1 from the phone number. THEN, MAGIC!!! names appeared FINALLY!

didn't work for me. anyone know other options? tried reset, and tried settings reset to default

Thanks, this worked for me 😀 Mine wasn’t even showing numbers, just a chat Id on 2 group messages. Id tried a phone restart to no avail, then did as you suggested closing the app & restarting & problem fixed - marvellous!