iPhone messages not showing contact names

Hi there... it happen on my new iPhone X and the only thing that worked was turning off the "images" on the text messages, and BINGO. Is not the best way to solve this because it has to be something wrong, but I hope it helps

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!

I have been having this issue as well. I have restarted messages. Even tried updating the contact itself and no luck its very frustrating especially if you do not remember the numbers lol. So i have the contacts saved in my phone and it will then start a new thread with just the number itself. I have talked to apple and they are stumped as well. So if someone has some simple fixes pleeeeease let me know. I am so close to making a new apple account which i do not want to do.

Very similar - what doesnt make sense is that on my iPhone, I see names/faces. On my MBP, I see phone numbers. I see similarly confusing randomness on my iPad. It leads me to the conclusion that the cloud is NOT the cloud... ALSO, I just noticed that when trying to add the number to an existing contact, the number is already there, but the issue is:

• A person in my contacts has msged me
• Their number is showing up as: 1234567890
• Their number in my contact is: +1 (123) 456-7890

iMessage cannot see that this is the same number, so I get bewildering messages from people that are in my contacts and all I see is a phone number... I am constantly diddling with contacts when I switch devices because my iPhone X might say Anne Marie, but my laptop says 1234567890 (sometimes with the person's picture!), then neither of my iPads has any idea who it is..

I have had lots of Apple devices (starting with the iPhone 3s and iPad 1 back in 2009), and perhaps over time the whole thing has become a hot, steaming mess, but it's just annoying enough to frustrate me, and not painful enough to take a day (or a week) to blow everything away and start over...

My incoming calls are showing numbers instead of contact names

Why do my text messages go to phone numbers instead of contacts??

My issue was caused by having my corporate email account deleted from my iPhone. Since all my contacts were sync'd to my corporate account, I lost contact names after deleting this account. I managed to recover them from an older iPhone in which the corporate account had not been deleted. I used an App to make a copy of the contacts then brought them over to my new iPhone. No longer sync'd to the corporate account and names show up in messenger instead of phone numbers.

I did 2 things which seems to solve my problem.

-I signed out & back into FaceTime & iMessage

-I disabled contacts on my iCloud account & then turned it back on

-I changed ‘contacts’ arrangement from ‘last,first ‘ to ‘first, last’ .

So, can you give me an idea why my numbers are coming up in my contacts as +91? I havent changed a thing on my phone. Apple techs are stumped to what the issue may be. So far all they have told me to do is not working. Also, it trys to change my trusted number and i have to stop it from doing so.

I experienced this problem with my iPad. When I went to look at the contents of the Contacts app, I noticed that there were no contacts so it occured to me that I might have disabled the cloud syncing for contacts i.e. the iPad was not accessing the contacts from my iPhone. To fix:

Go to <Settings>, tap on your apple ID at the very very top left of the page, tap on <iCloud>, make sure the button beside <Contacts> is on (green).

This fixed things for me 🙂

This fixed the problem for me! But I didn't have to power off the device. I just edited each of my contacts by typing the word "test" in the notes field, and then the names started showing up in Messages again.

Yes that actually fixed my issue thanks. Started after needing to log out of iCloud on my phone. Once I re logged the issue appeared.

Changing Short-name from Settings>Contacts>Short Name change to any setting get back in messages and you should see the change from numbers to contact name. After change the setting back to what it was or need.

Do all your devices have the current software. My iPhone is my main device and keep it backed up and my iPod and iPad update to the same info on iphone. The iCloud shows info from phone. It is good to keep icloud backed up

incase you need to do a sudden reset of phone and lose all your information. Have you tried deleting contact and reinputting contact then backing up. Is your information correct in imessage settings. In settings; your name; iCloud

now has a message button; have you turned it green? That was added in last update and not everyone knows it is there. Have you updated your devices to the current iOS version.

Okay, I had this exact issue and tried many of the recommendations with no luck. For me the real issue was the account where I stored the original contact information. I use a Excahnge account rather than iCloud so my solution came by first going to Settings -> Accounts & Passwords and confirming the account was connected then over to Settings -> Contacts -> Default Account and selected the Exchange account as my default. Good luck!!

I had the same issue. I am NOT syncing contacts to icloud but rather to GOOGLE contacts and I have gmail app installed also. I found that my gmail app was greyed out but once i opened it, the contacts reappeared in chats and call log. I suppose turning on and off the contacts in google account might also fix things--

Settings / Accounts & Passwords / Gmail / contacts