My Smartphone Address Book Is a Mess. How Can I Clean It Up?

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I have multiple contact listings for the same person on my smartphone. How can I consolidate redundant contacts?

I can relate. I’ve got scores of duplicates among my own contacts.

Neither one of us should feel bad though; the issue is fairly common. Before I tell you how to merge duplicate entries on your device, let me briefly explain how this happens.

Tech Guru

AARP writer Ed Baig will answer your most pressing technology questions every Tuesday. Baig previously worked for USA Today, BusinessWeek, U.S. News & World Report and Fortune, and is author

of Macs for Dummies and coauthor of iPhone for Dummies and iPad for Dummies.

Have a question? Email personaltech@aarp.org​

Your contacts likely migrated from multiple sources: email accounts, social media, third-party apps. Through the years, you may have manually added folks or synchronized contact lists via a

cloud service, with your computer or on another mobile device.

If you’re signed into the cloud, changes made to contacts on one device should theoretically be reflected on all other devices signed in to the same account.

Think about the individuals on your list. Maybe you initially entered the email and office numbers for a coworker. Later, after you became buddies outside work, you separately added your

pal’s personal email and mobile number. The person’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter/X handles also were inserted.

The contact may have moved, switched jobs, married, divorced. Maybe this stuff was updated, maybe not.

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In some instances, listings for the same person appear as contacts with slightly different names. My own contact listings have appeared as Edward C. Baig, Edward Baig and Ed Baig because at

various stages, I’ve entered my name differently.

It’s entirely possible that you want to keep separate entries for certain people, maybe to segregate their work lives from their private ones. But because of your question, I’m going to

assume you want to clean up a contacts roster that, like mine, has gotten messy.

Launch the Contacts app. For reference, when I recently opened up All Contacts on my iPhone, Apple flagged 158 duplicates. See, told you, I’m not immune.