Why do we have duplicate, triple or worse contacts in our smartphone? How do I clean up this list?
About our smartphones, contacts are a very important aspect. The applications that bring them together allow easy and quick access to our entire address book, to contact so and so in a few clicks, whether by telephone, email or any other messaging service. Over time, the contact list can grow. And it’s not always easy to keep it clean. A fortiori when certain contacts are present in several copies.
Before the advent of our smartphones, contacts only existed locally on our phones, in limited numbers, with an even smaller number that could be stored directly on the SIM card. Since smartphones and advanced mobile operating systems, our contacts have greatly multiplied, as have their origins. To simplify the experience for users, the OS offer applications grouping them together. And often add backup and synchronization services.
Unfortunately, insofar as the contacts are identified via simple character strings, all it takes is a tiny difference in the form for the systems to see there two distinct contacts. Result of the operation, we end up with two different contacts which are however the same, with a small difference on such and such a line in the form.
Worse still, synchronization systems like iCloud can, like any software, have bugs. Some time ago, an iCloud bug just duplicated your contacts. Without having any unfortunate consequences – a duplicate contact represents very little storage – seeing such duplicates in the list can be frustrating on a daily basis.
To remove duplications, there are unfortunately not many solutions. The first of these, the most tedious, is to do the cleaning by hand. For each duplicate contact, you will have to decide which record to keep and manually delete the others. Be careful though, with this method, if the source of the duplication (a synchronization via another application, for example) is still active, the duplications may reappear.
OSes, whetherAndroid or iOS, offer solutions to merge duplicate contacts (Android) or identify duplicates and delete them easily (iOS, but it takes go through the Contacts application of macOS).
Choose the method that suits you the most and take the time necessary to clean up your contact list. Your smartphone will thank you!