Your iPhone contacts often fall into the same mess that your social media circles do. From a select few, it eventually turns into its own country. Deleting an individual contact on your phone is easy. But there comes a day when you search for ways to delete multiple contacts on your iPhone.
This article will show you several ways to delete multiple contacts on your iPhone to organize your contacts list.
But unlike Android, there’s no similar quick-tap feature in iOS that enables you to batch-delete contacts you don’t want to keep. So let’s work around that limitation with a similar method and third-party apps.
How to Delete Multiple Contacts on an iPhone
The fastest way to delete multiple contacts at once is the two-finger drag method on a group of contacts.
Place two fingers on a contact within the group, and hold down adjacent contacts while you move your fingers up or down to select and highlight them.
Release your finger to finalize the selection. If you want to include additional contacts, repeat step 3.
To delete selected contacts, long-press on any highlighted contact with one finger, and select the “[X] Delete contact” option from the dropdown menu. Here “X” is the number of contacts you have selected.
The two-finger drag method won’t let you delete non-adjacent contacts. Therefore, to make better use of this drag-and-delete method, you can organize the contacts you want to delete into a separate Contacts list on your iPhone.
Use iCloud to Delete Multiple Contacts on an iPhone
Maybe you don’t own a Mac yet, or maybe you’re a Windows user. In that case, it’s easy to log into your iCloud account from any web browser and delete multiple contacts at once.
After that, all your contacts will be synced again on all your devices that share this iCloud account.
Use the App to Delete Multiple Contacts
The above two methods force you to jump through some hoops. If you find it cumbersome, take the help of a third-party app to delete contacts in bulk on your iPhone.
Here are two contact management apps that you can download from the App Store.
1. Group
Groups is a well-recommended app that can handle mass deletion of contacts. One of the free features is a faster way to delete contacts, while other advanced features are unlocked through in-app purchases. This limitation isn’t a problem when you just want to weed your way to a cleaner contact list.
Note that Groups is ad-supported in the free version.
2. Clean up duplicate contacts
Cleanup Duplicate Contacts is another address book cleaner app that you can use for one of its many functions. It analyzes your contacts and removes or merges any duplicate contacts. But it also gives a simple way to select contacts and delete them in one go.
These two, of course, aren’t the only third-party iPhone apps that work. Any capable contact manager should be able to handle this missing feature in the iPhone.
After this quick exercise, you should now go to your contact list and verify that all your unwanted contacts have been removed. If anything has gone wrong, you should immediately retrieve your deleted iPhone contacts.
When should you bulk delete all your contacts?
Address book management is another digital habit that can either help or hurt your productivity. Yes, it’s easy to find numbers with the search on your device, but why keep unnecessary numbers and get confused by them? They could also bring up bad memories.
Good management of your contacts is easy with a short list.
Mass-deleting your contacts is also a simple privacy move. You should remove sensitive numbers before lending your device to someone or giving it to a family member. In any case, it is always wise to go for the nuclear option when you give away, donate or sell your old phone.
Thus, you should protect your privacy by erasing all your data (which includes all your contacts) from your iPhone or iPad. Signing out of iCloud prevents others from accessing the data you’ve saved there. And if you get a new phone, why not start with these steps for a clutter-free and minimalist phone.