Clean up your contacts list to prioritize the people you actually want to talk to.
It's easy for your phone's contact list to get out of control, especially if you've carried the same (growing) list over to every new phone for a decade or more. If you haven't cleaned these up in a while, or ever, a decluttering is in order.
Getting rid of old contacts you never speak to and and improving the entries for the ones you do makes your contact list an asset instead of a big, messy pile of unhelpful info. Plus, it improves other apps and features your contacts interact with, like maps and voice assistants. Following a few steps makes it a manageable process.
Before you begin, you should understand how contact saving works on Android and iPhone. Unlike the "dumbphone" days, where contacts were stored on the SIM card or your phone's internal storage, iOS and most Android phones keep your contacts synced to your email account by default. On iPhone, this is your iCloud account, while on Android it's your Google account. And when you add your other email accounts (like Yahoo or Outlook) to your device, you have the option to pull and sync contacts from there too.
Some Android phones let you save contacts on the device itself, but this isn't recommended since you'll have to back them up manually and will lose them if your phone breaks.
First, you should put all your contacts in the same service. Depending on how many email accounts you have synced to your phone, your contacts might be scattered across them. Having them in one place simplifies everything and makes them easy to back up. It's also more convenient to manage contacts in bulk using an email provider's web interface. Picking one home for your contacts now also prevents you from having to repeat the cleanup steps later across multiple accounts. There are third-party apps and services that claim to automate this, though we have not tested them.
To check this on an iPhone, open the Contacts app and tap the arrow at the top left. Each header (like Gmail and iCloud) shows how many contacts you have in them. While you can choose the All Contacts view to see them as one mega-list, that doesn't help solve the clutter issue. On Android, open the Contacts app, tap your account and choose All contacts.
The easiest way to move contacts is logging into the relevant account on the web, finding the Export Contacts option (which usually provides a CSV or VCF file) and then importing those contacts into your chosen service. Google Contacts is a solid option thanks to its cross-device syncing and automatic management tools.
Once you've moved all your contacts to a central location, you'll want to turn off other accounts to stop seeing any duplicates. On an iPhone, head to Settings > Apps > Contacts and choose Contacts Accounts. Tap any account whose contacts you don't want to sync anymore and disable the Contacts slider. Finally, on the main Contacts page in Settings, choose Default Account and pick the service where new contacts will save to.
On Android, go to Settings > Accounts and backup > Manage accounts. Tap the account whose contacts you don't need anymore, then choose Account sync and disable Contacts. It's possible that this will prevent future syncing while keeping current contacts; you can either clean them up in the next stage or remove that account from your phone entirely if you don't need it.
Now that your contacts are in a central hub, it's time to do the bulk of the work. Start by fixing duplicate entries. Google Contacts may alert you to this at the top, or you can use the Merge & fix tool on the left (which also has other suggestions like adding someone's email address you've contacted before). Look through each one carefully to avoid false positives.
Next, set up contact groups if you haven't already. These are available in iCloud contacts as well and allow you to put people into buckets like work, family and businesses. Consider making a Favorites group for the people closest to you. You should also mark them as Favorites in your Contacts app, as that this gives them priority in places like the top of your Phone app and as exceptions to Do Not Disturb / Focus modes.
Once the obvious duplicates are gone, take a manual scroll through your contacts. As you go, sort people into the groups you made above as needed. Delete anyone you don't need anymore. If you aren't sure, create a group called "Archive" or similar and keep "maybe" contacts there so they're out of your main view. Use the checkboxes in the web interfaces to easily select multiple people and delete/group them at once.
Once your contacts list is stripped down to people you actually want to stay in touch with, it's worth taking another pass to clean up the entries that remain. If you have multiple contacts with the same first name, add their last names so there's no ambiguity. This is especially important while using Apple CarPlay or Android Auto — your phone will ask you to confirm the name if it's not sure, which adds additional distractions. In other cases, adding someone's relationship to you, like "Mary [Babysitter]", can be helpful.
Adding profile photos is another good way to improve the quality of your phone contacts. The default icon with their initials is boring and quickly becomes hard to keep track of in group chats. Grab their profile photo from social media, or use a photo you have of them, and assign it to their contact. If your friends have set up Google's Calling Cards or Apple's Contact Posters, you won't need to do this.
Don't forget that your phone can store a lot of contact info beyond someone's phone number and email address. Add their birthday, and you'll see it on your calendar. Save their address, and you can navigate to their house in Apple Maps or Google Maps by entering their name. You can set custom ringtones and/or text tones so you know who's trying to reach you without having to look at the screen. There's even a Notes field if you need to jot down why you have someone in your contacts or record related info.
You might find other bits to clean up as you go through your contacts, like someone whose last name has changed or who no longer uses an old number. After a push through the biggest changes, you can tidy up the rest over time. And after all that hard work, it's not a bad idea to export your cleaned-up contacts and save the file somewhere safe as a backup.
