There was a time when all your contacts were stored on the good old fashioned SIM card so duplicate contacts wasn’t really a thing - or at least not as much of a thing as it is these days. Now, your phone’s contacts list likely comes from a number of different places - an iCloud backup, Gmail contacts and perhaps contacts from another email account for example - resulting in what could be several duplicates.
Prior to iOS 16 launching in 2022, cleaning up your contacts was no easy task. If you are running iOS 16 or later (the most recent isiOS 17) however, it’s a piece of cake. Here’s how to clean up your contacts oniPhoneand get rid of those duplicates. If you just want to delete a contact on iPhone, head to the bottom of this feature and we’ve detailed the steps on how to do that too.
Apple iPhone 15
How to merge contacts on iPhone and delete duplicates
to get rid of duplicate contacts on iPhone and clean up your contacts so you only have one contact card for Joe Bloggs with all the information from the other three cards you might have, follow these steps.
How to merge contacts with different names
You may find that after following the steps above that you have a few contact cards remaining that are for the same person but they are named differently. The method above will only merge contact cards with the same name.
To merge contacts that are named differently, follow these steps:
The contact card will be named the same as the first contact card you selected. If you want to change this, follow these steps:
How to delete a contact on iPhone
If you’ve cleaned up your contact list and merged all those duplicates but you’ve now realised there are some in the remaining list that you really don’t need, it’s time to get deleting. Deleting a contact on iPhone is actually not as simple as you’d think. Normally, you can swipe right to left to delete on iPhone, whether that’s a message, email or Note, for example. You can’t do that for a contact though.
