What’s new in Contacts with iPadOS 16

In this video, we’re going to take a look at what’s new with the context app on the iPad with iPad os 16. We have duplicate search, we can now manage our groups or what they call lists, as well as a richer contextual menu. Let’s take a look at what’s new with the Contacts app on the iPad with iPad os 16. Let’s go over to my iPad.

Let’s first look at duplicates. So I’m in my contacts app here. And if we look over on the left, where I have all of my different contacts, I’m viewing all of my contacts. If we look, you’re gonna see that I have my wife Beth in here three different times. Well, the Contacts app will detect that and what it’ll do is it’ll tell you that it found a duplicate. And now what we’re able to do is merge those together. Now, this is a better experience than what we have on the Mac, the Mac, and the Contacts app has always been able to merge duplicates. But it was basically a one step solution, I found some duplicates, do you want me to merge these together with the iPad and the iPhone as well with the iPad, what we can do is we can view which contacts are duplicates. And we can view the different information in each contact before we merge them. So when I tap on view duplicates here, we can see that it found three cards that has Beth in it, I want to see those three cards before I merge them. Well, all I have to do is just tap on this. And now I can see those three cards.

Again, I could go on merge these. But before I merge them, I’d like to see what information is on these individual cards. Let’s go to the last card, we can see it doesn’t have any information at all. If I go to the second card, it has in there that she is my wife. And then the first card will have her phone number email address. So what will happen when I merge these together is it’ll create one card with the contact information from all three of these. So the first card here would include the information from the second card saying that she has my spouse. So merging contacts on the iPad is a much better experience than it is on the Mac, even with MacOS Ventura, at least from what I’ve seen, what it does is just a blanket statement, let’s just go and merge these together. So what I would recommend doing is if you have duplicates, find those duplicates and merge them together on the iPad or the iPhone, because then you can actually see the individual information, see what context it’s going to merge together. Maybe you don’t want to merge them all together, what will you be able to do is individually select which ones you want to merge together.

Another new feature that they’ve added with the Contacts app is groups or lists, they’ve now changed the name from groups to lists. When we worked with our groups, I’m going to click on the icon in the upper left hand corner, you can see that we have these different groups or lists. We could only create these groups or lists and icloud.com, or on the Mac, we couldn’t create these on the iPad or the iPhone. Well, now what we’re able to do is create these lists. Again, they are no longer code groups they are lists, what I can do is I can create new lists, and then add people to that list right from my iPad. So when I go over to node, boom, here, I can see all of the people in that list, I want to add a new person to it, I can tap on the plus I want to remove a person from it, I just swipe to the right and I can remove that person from that group or list. We can also use drag and drop.

Let’s say I wanted to add Abigail over to Noah boom, I’ll have to do is just take this contact and move it over to Noah boom. And now when we go over to Noah boom, we can see we have Abigail on there. So now we can manage these lists or groups on the iPad and the iPhone in addition to iCloud and on the Mac. And then they also updated the contextual menu. Now they actually did this throughout the iPad. But what I found with the context app, it’s a perfect example of what you can do with the contextual menu. When I tap and hold on Apple news, watch what happens I get my little contextual menu which is nothing new. But what they did is they improve the experience. If I go over to message here, I can go and select which email address I want to use for messaging. I go over to mail again, if I had multiple email addresses in here I’d be able to select which email address all I’m doing is just hovering over top of the contextual menu. I can remove it from my list I can

even delete the contact. And again, all we have to do is just tap and hold. Or if you have a trackpad, you can click and hold, and then you get the contextual menu. Now the last thing I want to mention is more of a tip. So I have these lists here. This is in my sidebar, I want to close the sidebar, how do I close the sidebar? If we look, I’m going to close it. I’ll show you how I close it here shortly. But if I close it here, we have the little sidebar button in the upper left hand corner. I tap on this and it opens up. But if we look, we no longer have that sidebar. So how do I close it? If I drag from the left to right down here, I’m going to drag here, it’s not doing anything. How do I close that list? Well, basically, what we need to do is just go up to where we have lists here. And then if I drag from the right to left, now what I can do is I can close that. So if we do it down here, it is not going to close it. But if we go up here to where we have lists and just go over to the right a little bit. Now what I can do is I can close it.

Also, if you have a trackpad, what you can do is you can just go anywhere, as long as you use two fingers on the trackpad, and swipe over, it’ll close it. So that can be a little confusing. When you open this up. It shows a sidebar, but now there’s no way to close it. Just go over to the right of lists and drag, and then you can close it. So that is what’s new with the Contacts app on the iPad with iPad os 16. We now can find duplicates. We can manage our groups, our lists, and then we have a richer contextual menu. So that’s what’s new with contacts on the iPad with iPad os 16. I hope this helps