iPhone messages not showing contact names

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!

Thank you Stanners 10. Your solution of turning short name off and back on fixed mine. None of the other solutions listed worked for me.

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

Thanks for this. For me, it was changing sort and display order which finally did the trick.

Turning off short name worked - thanks!!!!

Try going to settings—> contacts—> short name and uncheck “prefer nicknames”

none of these options has worked for me, unfortunately. and now I somehow lost even the contact data that was previously viewable. (before, it wasn't linking, but was still there). And yes, I have turned cloud contacts on and off and on again. and everything else suggested on this page

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.

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.

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...

Hi This fixed my 6S plus 10.3.3

Great tip

Stash

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