How to Delete Duplicate Contacts on iPhone and Mac Without Installing Software

You have probably already had to delete “duplicate” contacts from the iPhone address book. A situation of this type can arise for several reasons. Perhaps because you created a contact and then after some time did it again without first checking if it was already there, or because in a first entry, you added some data to a specific contact and then, after some time, inserted others by creating a new one instead of modifying the existing one.

Another possibility, perhaps the most common of all, is that you imported the entire address book from a SIM card even though some of them were already present on the phone.

Delete duplicate contacts on iPhone

In a more or less efficient way, several applications allow you to merge double contacts on iPhone. The same function, sometimes forgotten, is already offered by Apple. It is called “Connect contacts.” It allows you to merge two or more contacts into one to make an order. You will have all the information collected in a single tab.

To merge two contacts:

• Open the “Contacts” application on the iPhone or iPad. You can also open the “Phone” app on the iPhone, then select the “Contacts” tab.
• Then open the contact card to be connected and click on the button “Edit”.
• At the bottom of the tab that opens, there is the “(+) connect contacts…” button; clicking on it, the address book will be shown again. From it, it is necessary to select the other contact to merge.
• Click on the “Connect” button visible in the upper right corner of the new window that appears on the screen to merge the two contacts.

>> NB by joining two or more contacts, all phone numbers, emails, URLs to web pages, addresses, birthdays, dates, social profiles, and any other information in each of them are collected in a single tab.

Delete duplicate contacts on Mac

The same thing can also be done from the Mac.

• First, you need to start the “Contacts” application.
• Select the first contact that will be part of the merger.
• The second (possibly also the third, fourth, fifth … thus joining them all within a single item) must be selected by holding down the Cmd key to create the multiple selection.
• At this point, click on “Card> Merge selected cards” in the status bar to complete the operation.

On Mac, there is also a duplicate search system, which scans the entire address book by tracking down contacts who share the same name. This system recognizes only those who share the same name and the same surname. If one of them has the name Pinco and the surname Pallo and the second is registered as Pallo in the name and Pinco in the surname, even if it is the same person, will not indicate it as a possible duplicate.

In these cases, however, the manual contact joining system described in the previous paragraph works. To use it, click on “Card> Search for duplicates …” in the status bar. Wait for the analysis to complete. Click on the “Merge” button to let the app do the whole thing.

Whether iPhone, iPad, or Mac complete the process is indifferent. As a result of iCloud synchronization, the duplicate contacts will eventually disappear from iPhone, iPad, and all devices that share the same account in the address book.