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This brilliant app does the dirty work of cleaning up your iPhone’s contacts

Published Apr 21st, 2015 7:00PM EDT
Best iPhone Apps Cleanup Duplicate Contacts

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Have you looked at your phone’s contacts list lately? If so then you may find that it’s become something of a mess that’s filled with people you’ve contacted once or twice over email who have now been imported into your master list. This problem is particularly bad if you import your contacts from multiple email accounts, which can lead to lots of duplicate entries for the same people. Thankfully, Joanna Stern of The Wall Street Journal has alerted us to a terrific app called Cleanup Duplicate Contacts that does a lot of the dirty work of fixing your overstuffed contacts list for you.

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What makes this app so great is its single-mindedness: It’s really only there to help you get your contacts list in order. It lets you backup your whole address book before merging contacts to ensure that you don’t accidentally lose someone forever and it gives you detailed reports on exactly how many duplicate contacts you have from different sources. It’s also very fast and can clean up a list of 5,000 contacts in an average of less than a minute.

Because this app is free to download, however, it does come with a catch.

“Before you use this, be aware that the creator of the app uploads this data to its servers in an effort to improve its stand-alone CircleBack app, which aims to give its users an always up-to-date, crowdsourced address book,” writes Stern of the app. “The company says it won’t contact anyone in your database.”

You can check out the app yourself by clicking here. You should also make sure to read Stern’s full list of tips for cleaning up your iPhone contact list by clicking here.

Brad Reed
Brad Reed Staff Writer

Brad Reed has written about technology for over eight years at BGR.com and Network World. Prior to that, he wrote freelance stories for political publications such as AlterNet and the American Prospect. He has a Master's Degree in Business and Economics Journalism from Boston University.