Names not appearing in Messages on Watch On Watch, I suddenly see no names for people in Messages. Instead I see the address (e-mail or phone number) they are sending from, even though the senders are in my Contacts and have the addresses associated with their entries.

This was not the case before a recent update (I'm not sure which one).

How do I get contact names to appear in Watch Messages?
This answer's a bit late, but I finally figured out the issue.

Your Apple Watch's contact list is most likely out of sync with your iPhone.



Try checking your Apple Watch's contact list though the phone app. If it looks like some contacts are missing, it's likely that the contact list isn't synced properly.

The easiest way to manually re-sync your contact list is to create a dummy contact "AAAAA" on your iPhone. Once it's been resynced, all your contacts should start displaying properly again.