The early days of cell phones meant having your contacts transferred from device to device during the upgrade process. With iCloud and email backups available you can easily transfer contacts to every new device you get. While this is really convenient, you wind up with older contacts from the late 2000s. Although these contacts are not doing your phone any harm, it may be time to purge some content from your Contacts list. In this article, we are going to tell you How to Easily Delete all the Contacts on iPhone. Let’s begin!
If you’d like to delete all of your contacts from your phone there’s a fairly simple way to do this. If you’d like to pick and choose which ones go it is a little more of a lengthy process. To save you time, we can show you how to delete your entire contact list (or in some cases hide multiple contacts).
Apple certainly does not make deleting all of your contacts a straightforward process. But there are a couple of ways you can delete all of your contacts. However, if you are simply trying to delete multiple contacts from your iPhone, we have an article on that specifically. Here, we will cover how you can delete all of your contacts from the iPhone. To erase all your contacts, we will use a workaround involving iCloud. If you have landed on this article because you are going to give your iPhone away or sell it, you should completely reset your iPhone instead. But if you want to know how to delete all contacts, keep reading.
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Contacts on the iPhone can easily get out of hand. Before you know it, you have got your Dad’s number next to “Delivery guy from Pizza Hut” and “Debbie, PTA mom”. You probably regularly contact about a dozen people, but I will bet you have over a hundred contacts. If you have decided enough is enough, you can delete all of your contacts. Of course, if you do this, all of your contacts will be gone. So write down any numbers you’ll want to add back. Deleting all of your contacts on the iPhone isn’t an obvious process but it is an easy one. If you’d rather just delete multiple contacts on your iPhone, this article shows you how. Here, we will cover how you can delete all of your contacts from the iPhone.
Delete All Contacts on iPhone
- Open the Settings App and scroll down to the Contacts on iPhone tab and then tap that button.
- Tap on Siri & Search then toggle the “Contacts Found in Apps” to the off position.
- Go back to the main screen of Settings and scroll up to Passwords & Accounts. Select a non-iCloud account, such as Gmail or another one.
- Slide the Contacts slider to the “Off” position. Doing this will lead you to be prompted to delete all of the contacts that are stored locally on your phone.
- Once you select the Delete From My iPhone, your contacts associated with that account will be deleted.
- Go back and do this for the various different Accounts on your phone and once you did that, you should not have any contacts left.
The good news here is this does not actually delete your contacts completely. Performing the above-listed tasks simply removes them from your iPhone.
Another option for hiding contacts (especially duplicates) is by going into the Contacts application on your phone – this is not the calling app. iPhones have an application specifically dedicated to Contacts. If you have trouble finding it swipe from the home screen to the right and type “Contacts” in the search bar at the top.
Once you open this application you can tap on Groups located at the top-right. This list shows you which backup source is showing contacts on your phone.
To hide Contacts on iPhone from a certain source, simply tap on it so that the blue checkmark goes away. Once you go back to your contact list you will notice some of the names and phone numbers are no longer clogging up your phone.
Delete Select Contacts
Although this is easier from the iCloud, it can be performed on your iPhone too. Using your iPhone you can click on each contact, then tap on the Edit button located at the top-right of the screen. Scroll all the way down this page and click on “Delete Contact” in red. Confirm and that individual will be gone.
This is an incredibly lengthy process if you have more than some contacts to purge. The simpler method is to log into iCloud on a computer and highlight multiple contacts at once.
Remove Contacts Using Desktop
You can delete all contacts easily using a desktop. Go to the iCloud website and sign in with your iCloud account. Once you have passed the two-factor authentication you can open the Contacts menu on the iCloud website. There are a few things you can do in terms of how you want to delete your contacts.
If you hold the control button and click multiple different people in your contact list. Then you will be able to bulk delete them. However, if you want to delete them all, you can press control and the A button simultaneously to select them all at one time.
Once you have them all selected, then you can hit the little cog on the bottom-left of the screen. From here, click on the delete option to remove the ones you have selected. Make sure that you really want them all deleted, as once you delete all the contacts, you will not be able to reverse the decision.
Edit Your Contacts on iPhone
When a friend or acquaintance gets a new phone number it may be super easy to just have them send you a text. From there you can click on the “i” with a circle around it and add a new contact. Eventually, you will have so many duplicates you won’t know which one is the most updated one.
To edit and update your contact’s information follow these steps to keep your log from becoming overwhelmingly confusing or cluttered:
- Go to the phone app on your iPhone and select the middle option for Contacts
- Tap ‘Edit’ in the top right-hand corner
- Tap the plus sign that is surrounded by a green bubble (‘add phone’ will be next to it because you can add multiple phone numbers for one person)
- Enter the new phone number
- Then tap the minus symbol in a red bubble to delete the old phone number – this also works with emails
Keeping your contacts log from filling up will help you to keep it organized over time. When backing up and restoring your phone you can go to the settings and choose which account you’d like to set as the default for contacts.
Similar to the instructions above go to contacts in the settings and scroll down until you see “Default Account.” Choose whether you’d like to keep your friends’ phone numbers in the iCloud or in an email account.
Conclusion
Alright, That was all Folks! I hope you guys like these Contacts on iPhone article and find it helpful to you. Give us your feedback on it. Also if you guys have further queries related to this article. Then let us know in the comments section below. We will get back to you shortly.
Have a Great Day!
Also see: How to Make a To-do List That Activates On Shut Down On macOS
