---
title: iOS Contact Hell
date: '2021-01-14'
words: 485
collection: ramblings
---

All I want to do is move my contacts to one location.

Seeing as Apple makes things somewhat hard these days, and until I'm running my
own CardDAV server (or equivalent), I'm trying to move all my contacts to
Google.

During this migration, I have somehow collected partially overlapping sets of
duplicated and original contacts between my two accounts. This is hardly
surprising, although what **is** surprising is how few tools built into iOS
there are at dealing with this. It's as if Apple truly believes you will never
use anything other than their precious iCloud services (or wants to make it
feel painful otherwise), yet they provide the ability to have multiple accounts
within iOS!

#### Step 1. Merge Contacts

For this task, I needed to download some random third party app, grant them
access to all of my contacts information (obviously), and tap though **one at a
time** each of my ~200 duplicate contacts. I could have done all the contacts
at once, if I was willing to pay for the premium version of the app.

Unfortunately, in the process some fields of my contacts didn't seem to be
preserved, namely the notes field. So I'm going to need to revise a contact
merging script I wrote a while back to fix this up later anyway.

This is insane! Apple should consider this feature to be a "Must Have" for any
contacts feature. But it gets worse.

#### Step 2. Move Contacts

Now that I've removed all the duplicate contacts using the sketchy contact
merging app, I notice that my contacts are still split between two accounts.
All I want is to move my Apple/iCloud contacts to Google.

There doesn't appear to be a way to resolve this issue in iOS either. So I'm
back to downloading random third party apps. First app I find kindly warns me
it will be unable to move more than 40 or so contacts without paying for the
premium version of the app. Of course this isn't an "In-App Purchase" but
another standalone app, so I had downloaded the app foolishly thinking it was
actually going to be free.

It also warned me that things wouldn't work well with Google unless I use their
other app, which requires actually logging into my Google account to do it's
magic (aka. import a set of contacts).

This too is insane! I honestly tried to use iOS. I honestly wanted to make
this work, where I would normally take the shortest path to a real computer and
do things by hand myself. It turns out I still have to do that anyway.  Apple
should consider this feature to be a "Must Have" for a contacts feature which
supports multiple accounts.


In summary, it's best to stick with exporting and managing your contacts on a
computer. This way you can make use of proper tools, or scripts to fix your
issues for free.