Why You Should Delete Your Duplicate iCloud Contacts

Contacts are one of the most important elements of your iPhone, and there’s nothing worse than having duplicate contacts that you can’t remove from your iCloud backup! Luckily, deleting duplicate iCloud contacts is not as difficult as it may seem. You just need to follow a few simple steps and delete any that you don’t need immediately. I’ll show you how below!

Apple makes it hard to delete duplicate contacts

In order to delete duplicate iCloud contacts, you need to have your iCloud contacts sorted by contact. Once they are in order and there are no more duplicates, you can highlight all of the highlighted contacts in iCloud and hit the Delete Contacts button. It will ask if you are sure that you want to do this. Select delete. Again it will ask if you are sure about deleting these contacts. Highlight each contact that is highlighted again, and select delete. If your duplicate contact list still won’t clear up, try changing how many contacts show per page from 500 at a time to 10-20 at a time when sorting.

What should you do if your contacts are duplicated?

If you ever had to create your iCloud account from scratch, chances are you have a couple duplicate contacts. Over time, you have added friends and family to your phone that are also in iCloud but somehow it has duplicated with the original. This post is going to teach you how to delete those duplicate contacts. 

It’s important to delete these contacts because if someone updates their contact information, it’ll change on all devices (unless they’re signed in). So, if somebody changed their phone number or email and synced that information with iCloud, the person’s information will be different on all of your other devices. 

This would be a problem if one day that person dies or gets hacked.

The reasons why people have duplicates in their iCloud contacts

It can be a common pain point for iCloud users to discover they have duplicate contacts. The causes are plentiful and very varied: adding an email address you had before in your iPhone’s native Contacts app and adding it again later in iCloud; transferring your old Android phone’s address book over to your new one, even though your new phone has some of the contacts too. From iCloud not uploading all of my information when I first joined, or the old Reminders app from iOS 9 where any contact you saved created a separate entry in the Reminders app, it just seems like everyone these days has way too many duplicates floating around on their Apple devices. It’s time to take action by deleting those extra listings!

Tips on how to delete duplicate contacts from your Apple device

Find and delete your duplicate iCloud contacts using this method:

-Find the Contacts app on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. Tap the Groups button at the bottom of the screen. Look for two entries with your first name. The entry that has a green plus sign next to it is what will be shown when you open Contacts on any of your devices in iCloud mode. If there is not a green plus sign next to one of them, then that contact’s data is not yet available across all devices in iCloud mode.

Ways to make sure you don’t have duplicate contacts in the future

Delete Your Duplicate iCloud Contacts To prevent having duplicate contacts in the future, you can move duplicates into a folder and delete them from your old device. They’ll also automatically be deleted on other devices if they haven’t been synced yet. So save time and energy by tackling this all at once instead of one device at a time.

Other ways you can fix your contact information

When you merge or get a new phone, your contact information might get messy. There are a few things you can do to fix it up. First, delete your duplicate iCloud contacts. Next, go through your list and make sure that every number has an associated name (it should say something like John Doe’s Work or My Cell Phone). If not, it’s important to attach the number to the contact with another iCloud backup before you upload it to your other devices. Last but not least, look for unnecessary photos in your Contacts and eliminate them by selecting Select All of the Photo at Once and then hitting Delete Photo on each photo one by one.