Contact Improv

Contact Management Overhaul

For over a decade, the iPhone address book has lagged behind the capabilities of its macOS counterpart. Unlike on the Mac, there was no functionality for creating or managing groups of contacts.

Additionally, since 2016, only macOS has been able to find duplicate contacts and merge them. iOS 16 brings an overhaul to the Contacts app on iOS with the introduction of these features.

For starters, you can now long press on a contact to get new management options, including Copy and Delete, in addition to the standard actions like Message, Call, and Mail. This is the first time you don’t have to tap a contact, tap Edit, and scroll to the very bottom just to reach Delete.

Manage Contact Lists

Groups are now called Lists and you can create, delete, and add/remove contacts among them. Looking at your list of contacts in Contacts (or in the Contacts section of Phone), you’ll see < Lists at the top instead of < Groups.

On the Lists screen, you can add a list or tap Edit to delete lists, one at a time. You can also long press on a list for options to Email All, Export, Rename, or Delete. Within a list, you can tap the envelope (✉︎) to email all contacts in the list that have email addresses. [Update: As of iOS 17, Message All is an added quick action for lists.]

However, unlike macOS Contacts, there’s not yet an equivalent to Edit Distribution List, wherein you can specify which among multiple email addresses to use for a specific contact in a list. Unfortunately, this setting doesn’t sync from the Mac either, but maybe it will in a future version.

Add Contacts to Lists

There are a few ways to add contacts to lists. The obvious way might be to open a list, tap the + button, and choose contacts to add. From this interface, you can also create new contacts to add to the group.

You can also open an individual contact and scroll to the bottom to see in what lists it is included and to add it to additional lists.

However, Contacts now supports drag-and-drop! Try this:

1. Long press (at least half a second) on a contact and start dragging it with your finger. You’ll see you now have a card under your finger.
2. You can tap additional contacts to add them to the stack, counted with a blue tag at the top right of the stack.
3. Then, use another finger to tap Lists at the top or swipe from the left edge to go back.
4. When you drag over a named list, the stack will get a green plus (⨁) as well as a number if you’ve amassed more than one contact. Drop your stack of contacts on a list to add them to it.

You can always continue navigating with other fingers until you’re ready to drop a contact/stack. If you decide you want to escape the experience, you can drop the stack at the top of the screen, on a list of contacts, or anywhere no group is selected. (This is equivalent to pressing Escape on a keyboard.)

Also, in the screenshot above, I tried creating a new list while dragging 10 contacts. Don’t do this; you can’t get the keyboard while dragging contacts and you can’t add them to an unnamed list. Instead, make sure the destination list already exists.

Merge Duplicate Contacts

Contacts will now automatically discover duplicate contacts and offer to merge them. It’s not instantaneous but periodically your iPhone will compare cards and give you the opportunity to review those with the same name.

When you view the duplicates of a given contact, the app lists the named contacts followed by the contact information that will exist after merging. To compare, you can tap on each individual contact entry to see the information already present for it.

Share Specific Contact Information

When sharing contacts, no longer must you share all the information you have on file, like someone’s birthday or their relatives or a private Facebook profile. Do you even know all the things you can store on a contact card?

At the top of the Share Contact panel, tap Filter Fields. Here you can select exactly the fields you want to provide when sharing one or more cards.

Speaking of which, to share more than one card, put them in a list together, long press the name of the list, and choose Export.