

They remain stored on iCloud or on your phone! Follow these instructions to back up those contacts to Google. However, the contacts that you had on your phone before are not moved to Google. It's very likely you will see something different on your phone: you may or may not have iCloud, you could have an Outlook account, and so on.ĭid you know? Connecting a Google account to an iPhone will import your Google Contacts. In the example shown to the left, there are three accounts moving contacts into this iPhone: Go to Settings -> Contacts -> Accounts to find out which services are allowed to manage/add contacts on your phone. So how does your iPhone manage contacts? This help article can't possibly cover all possible scenarios, but here's how you can easily find out how your iPhone is setup currently. The idea is ultimately that your phone merely acts as a window into contacts databases, so we suggest you visit or /contacts respectively to see & manage these lists. Where is your mom's contact stored? Is it in iCloud? Google Contacts? Your SIM card? Worse yet, is it in all three of them simultaneously? Your iPhone actually dedupes them & merges identical contacts visually! While in some cases it is handy to have your iPhone consolidate contact lists, in most cases it actually leads to confusion. Because everything is neatly merged, there is no easy way to recognize in which cloud database a specific contact is being stored.

Managing multiple contact lists on an iPhoneĪ quick way to find out which contacts are currently loaded up on your iPhone, is by going inside the Contacts app, or the Phone app of your iPhone.īy tapping the Groups icon on the top left, you'll understand that an iPhone is capable of visibly merging different databases into one single contact list.

By default, an iPhone will store contacts on iCloud, or, if you've opted out from iCloud, it will store them locally on your phone.
