What’s new in Contacts on the iPhone with iOS 16

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In this video, we’re going to look at what’s new with the Contacts app on the iPhone and iOS 16, we can now find duplicates, we can manage our own lists or groups. And we have new shortcuts or long presses for accessing different features in the Contacts app. Let’s take a look at these on my iPhone. Let’s first look at duplicates. Now when I go over to my phone app, we do have to access this feature from our contacts when I go over to my phone app here, which is in my dock. And then when I look at my contacts, here, I’m looking at my contacts, what you’re going to see is I have some duplicates here, I have Beth in here multiple times. And then I also have Tim Cook in here a couple of times, I really don’t have his number, but I just thought I’d use it as a name.

So these are duplicates? Well, when I’m in the phone app, I’m not able to manage these duplicates, I can’t remove them or merge them, what I have to do is go to the Contacts app. So that’s the first thing, we do have to access this from the Contacts app. So I’m going to swipe up. And then when we go over to contacts, you’re going to see when I’m looking at all of my contacts, again, I have Tim here and a couple of times. And then I have Beth here a few times. And then if we go down towards the bottom, we now have two duplicates found. Also, you may see this up towards the top. I dismissed this earlier as I was testing this out. So then what it does is it moves it down towards the bottom. So there’s basically going to be two spots where you can see if there’s duplicates, you’ll see a nice banner up here towards the top.

And then if you dismiss that, you’ll see it down towards the bottom. So now that we know that we have two duplicates found, what can we do? Well, basically, what we’re able to do is select which duplicates we want to merge. So let’s go ahead and tap on two duplicates found here. And you’re going to see it shows me my two duplicates, so I can review which contacts are duplicated. Let’s first look at Tim Cook, I found two records. So I tap on. And now what I’m able to do is see the actual two records here. And I can see what the merge contact information is going to be. So what it’s basically going to do is merge these two contexts together, it’s going to merge this one and this one and I can tap on these to view the contact. And then the result is going to be this here. So it’s going to merge those two phone Numbers together.

This Tim Cook has a 5551212 number. While this Tim Cook has the apple 800 number. And when I merged them together, it’s going to include both of those, but it’s going to be one contact. So let’s go and merge this. Tap on Merge. And now you can see I only have Beth here as a duplicate because Tim is now merged. So let’s go and take a look at it. I’m going to cancel this. And then you’re going to see that I have one Tim Cook here. And it has both of those phone Numbers in there. So we can now find and merge duplicates. What else is new? Well, when we go back over to our contacts, you’re gonna see we have lists.

These are groups and previous versions of Mac OS, and iOS, these were called groups or were able to do as VR contexts and in different groups. Well, prior to iOS 16, how we arrange these groups or made these groups or organize these groups was only available on the Mac. And in iCloud. You couldn’t organize these on the iPhone or the iPad. Well, now you can create different groups or different lists, they renamed it, it’s now called lists so I can create different lists. And then I can add people to those lists. So basically, we’re able to organize our lists on the iPhone itself. So let’s go on add another list here. I’m going to add it to my iCloud. I have a couple of different accounts here. And you’re gonna see we have the list name. So let’s just call this one work. tap on Done, we do not have any contacts in here. So let’s go and add a contact, tap on we can see it has no contacts, I tap on Add contacts. And we’re gonna go with Apple, and Tim, tap on Done. And now we can see that those contacts are in there. And if I want to add more, I can tap on the plus in the upper right hand corner to add more. I want to remove one of them. All I have to do is just swipe to the right and I can remove it from that group or that list.

The last thing I want to show you is when we’re looking at these contexts, if we long press on them, we have more options. We have a little contextual menu that shows up. So I’m going to go to Tim Cook here and when I long press on his name You’re gonna see that I can message him, I can call him, I can Apple Pay him, I can also copy this contact, I can share the contact, I can make this my card. So if Tim took over this phone, maybe I sold it to Tim or gave it to Tim, he could make this his phone by going and making the contact his card, then that will go and make all of the autofill with Tim’s information as opposed to my information. And then we also can delete it. So again, all we have to do is now just long press on it. We’re going to get the contextual menu, and then from here, we’re going to see more options. So those are what’s new with the Contacts app on the iPhone with iOS 16.

Probably the two biggest things are we can find and merge duplicates, and it does a really nice job. Prior to this, we could only do this on the Mac and it wasn’t nearly as nice on the Mac, it would just merge them all together. Here we can choose which context we want to merge. And then we can actually get a preview of what it’s going to look like. We can also manage different groups on the iPhone or in the Contacts app on the iPhone. And we can long press on any contact to get more information. So that is what’s new with the Contacts app in iOS 16 on the iPhone