Merge iPhone Contacts with Gmail Contacts
Problem:
You have 1000 contacts on your iPhone and 4000 contacts in gmail. You want to merge them and use gmail as your main contacts list.
Some people say you can do it with iTunes but that simply copied the 4000 contacts to the phone but did not copy the 1000 to gmail. This made the problem worse.
Here is what you need to do:
1. Enable icloud contacts sync on your phone
[settings, mail contacts calendar, icloud, contacts:on]
this will push all the phone contacts to icloud
make sure you choose “merge” when it asks you
2. enable icloud contacts sync on your laptop
[search for icloud, check the box for contacts]
open the Contacts app
all the contacts from your phone will be pulled into the Contacts app – confirm that they do
allow time for everything to sync
3. confirm that you can see all of your icloud contacts on your laptop
disable the icloud contacts on your phone
choose “delete on my iphone” when asked
4. add your gmail contacts to your laptop
[Contacts, Preferences, Accounts, +]
account type = cardDAV
username = youremail@gmail.com
pass =
server = google.com
5. at this point you can see your icloud contacts and google contacts together in your Contacts app on your laptop
you can simply drag and drop everything from icloud to google (this can take a long time to finish – my test took 30 minutes for 900 contacts)
when finished, you can remove the icloud account from contacts on your laptop if you wish
6. Clean up and de-duplicate your google contacts
You phone already has your google contacts and it is already set as default
once you clean up the google contacts using the gmail interface the changes will be reflected on the phone as well