How to Merge & Get Rid of Duplicate Items from your iPhone Contacts List

Duplicate contacts weren’t really a thing back then, or at least they weren’t as common as they are now because all of your contact numbers were stored and saved on a physical SIM card.

In today’s information age, your mobile phone’s contacts list likely originates from multiple different sources online, including an iCloud backup, Gmail contacts, and accounts with other email providers. Given these various places where you store your contact list, it’s a no-brainer why you find and see a lot of duplicate items on your iPhone’s contact list. Several contact names, numbers, and email addresses unique to a single person might be found in different entries on your smartphone.

How to Find, Merge & Remove or Delete Duplicate Contacts on an iPhone

Follow these instructions to clean up your iPhone contact phone numbers on your iOS device and get rid of duplicates or double entries from your list. It’s easy to spot multiple duplicate contacts and merge or delete them from your device’s contact list.

1. Launch the Phone app on your iPhone with iOS 16 or later installed.
2. Click or tap the “Contacts” tab in the lower middle part of the mobile screen.
3. If you have duplicate contacts, a pop-up will be shown over the display under your card.
4. Click on “View Duplicates”
5. A list including every duplicated contact will be visible. 
6. At the bottom of your screen, click “Merge All.”

After that, all of your contacts that were duplicated will be moved to a single contact card on your iPhone that incorporates all of their unique data from each additional card.

Deleting and Merging Duplicate Contacts Manually on an iOS Device

Manually deleting and merging duplicate contacts on your iPhone using the Phone app is one of the simplest fixes available for this prevalent issue. For a quick workaround, follow these procedures on your iOS device.

1. Run the Phone app on your iPhone and select Contacts from the list of options.
2. Find and open any duplicate contacts that could be shown in your contact list.
3. To make adjustments, tap the Edit button.
4. To eliminate the duplicate contact, press the Delete Contact option when you’ve reached the bottom of the page.
5. As an alternative, you can pick all of the appropriate duplicate contacts from the list by choosing the Link Contacts option and then merging all of the duplicate contacts into a single contact profile.

Use iCloud Account to Delete Multiple Duplicate Contacts at Once

Utilizing the iCloud service online is another efficient way to remove duplicate contacts from your iPhone. If your iPhone and iCloud accounts are frequently synced, you can use it to select and remove several duplicate contacts at once. To get there, just follow these steps.

1. Go to the iCloud website by opening a new tab in your web browser.
2. Use your Apple id credentials to log into your iCloud account.
3. To view all of the synced iPhone contacts, press the Contacts button after successfully logging into your iCloud account.
4. On the following page, you can see a list of all the contacts that have been synchronized between your iPhone and iCloud.
5. To select all of the necessary duplicate contacts, press the Ctrl key and click on each one.
6. After that, look for a Gear icon in the screen’s lower-left corner and select the Delete option to immediately delete all of the duplicate contacts you’ve chosen.
7. To confirm changes, tap the Delete button.
8. These changes will appear in your iPhone’s contact list as soon as it syncs with your iCloud account once more.

All done. Using your iCloud account, you were able to eliminate several duplicate contacts at once and remove them from your iPhone.

These are the easy but effective methods you may use to combine or remove duplicate contacts from your iPhone. Follow the instructions above and you will be seeing no more duplicate entries in your contact list in no time.