Name of sender of SMS or iMessages missing, only number shown On iPhone 4, there is no name of the sender of SMS nor iMessage, only his/her number, and naturally, I want the name to be displayed too. How to do this? I tried some things like:


Resetting the phone using sleep button
Resetting the phone using sleep+home at the same time
Toggling on/off iMessages in Settings -> iMessages,
Setting short name/last/first name,
Toggling contacts in Settings -> iCloud,
Toggling iCloud itself even (delete iCloud account on the iPhone and re-add it),
Resetting Network settings
I also tried setting the default account from iCloud to Gmail, and deleting the contact, and adding it again, this time to Gmail account (being the default one, this is what happens).


Still doesn't work, only the number is displayed, and appears it is not synced to contacts at all. How can I have the name of the sender (from contacts) displayed in the SMS so I know from whom the SMS or iMessage is from?

To be more specific, this is not the problem with short names, but the names are not displayed at all, only the person's number. Obviously, I don't remember people's phone numbers, so I really need this to work.
I just had this issue happen on iOS 10.0.2. It started after I signed out of iCloud and back in (all of my contacts are stored on iCloud). I tried some of the same things you tried, all to no avail.

In my case, I noticed that all of the old message threads showed "+1 (nnn) nnn-nnnn", but all of my contacts use the "(nnn) nnn-nnnn", i.e. no country prefix. On a whim, I edited just one of the contacts that was having the issue and added the +1 prefix to their mobile number. I switched back to Messages, and right away, not only was that message thread fixed, they all were! Then I went back to that contact, removed the +1, and everything was still fixed. An easy fix, but very odd!

Of course, if you're outside the US you may need to use a different country prefix.