An organized, up-to-date, and fully backed-up address book would be my dream come true. People who have had to replace a phone unexpectedly, either because it was lost, stolen, or irreparably damaged, know how important it is to have a backup of their contacts list. We've all seen the friend who posts on social media, "I lost my phone. Text me on this number and tell me who you are."
Like most people, my contacts are all over the place. I work to keep family and friends' information up to date in Apple Contacts. The email addresses of most my work associates are in my business email account. My personal Gmail and other personal email accounts have a smattering of useful information in their associated contacts lists, but they are also littered with auto-saved information, like every organization I've ever emailed a support@ message.
Many companies have tried to solve the problem of having scattered contacts saved across several different databases. I've tried plenty of them, and the sad truth is I've never found one that has every feature I want in a centralized address book.
Build Your Own
A few years back, I experimented with ad-hoc methods of generating custom contacts lists, mostly by using IFTTT. It wasn't a complete failure, but it ended up generating spreadsheets, which aren't all that user friendly or fun to search from a mobile device.
If you like to have a lot of control, however, building your own contacts list may be the way to go. Just be sure to back it up and save it someplace that's accessible to you from a mobile device so you can make phone calls and pull up people's addresses when you're at the post office mailing gifts (my two most important use cases, aside from email).
Third-Party Contact Options
A number of mobile apps do a decent job of merging and syncing contact information from many sources. FullContact (Android, iOS, web) is pretty good. You connect it to email accounts and other online services that have contacts lists associated with them, and it merges databases into one place. But then it does something different. FullContact scours the web for up-to-date information on those same people.
When I started writing this article, I hadn't used FullContact in a while, so I ran my contacts through its magic process. At first, I was shocked to learn that a fairly high-level editor I knew was now apparently also president of an organization that dabbled in advertising! What a sellout, I thought. But they I went digging online for more information and it turns out it was someone else with the same name. Unfortunately, FullContact hadn't given me enough context to realize I was dealing with the wrong guy, which is a problem you might run into with this app, too. When I searched on my own, I knew the moment I saw the guy's photo that it was a case of mistaken identity.
Cloze (Android, iOS, web) is another app I've turned to now and then over the years, although it's become more of a customer-relationship app than a contacts management app. Like FullContact, Cloze starts by asking you to connect various accounts, and then it pulls together everything you have. Its signature feature, however, is that it connects with social media accounts too, giving you more insight into what your contacts are doing, not just how to get in touch with them. In analyzing not just your contacts but the interaction you have with them and frequency, Cloze identifies people who should theoretically be most important to you, at least from a getting-ahead perspective.
A big problem with Cloze and FullContact is that you only get so much out of them before you have to pay a hefty subscription fee, to the tune of $159 and $99 per year, respectively.
Two Free Staples
As I continued my search for a way to merge, organize, and backup my contacts list, I found myself returning to two staples: Google Contacts and Apple Contacts. Both store their data in the cloud, and both are easy to restore on an iPhone or Android phone. They're free (insert disclaimer here about how I know nothing is truly "free"...). And they both have tools for pulling in information from other sources and de-duping your list. Unfortunately, the deduping part is a huge disappointment with both apps.
Google Contacts was recently updated to have a different look and some new features, but it was a little light on the number of services it could connect with to import contact automatically. Plus, to import contacts manually, you have to switch back to the old version of the app, as the new one can't do it yet.
Apple Contacts, in the end, has become my top choice. It connects to many more services than I had realized. In addition to the obvious, iCloud, it also works with AOL, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft Exchange, Yahoo, and anything else that can generate a CardDAV or LDAP file. I'm sure this solution is a disappointment to Android users, and that's not lost on me. I have an Android device and am still trying to decide on the best method for making my iCloud contacts accessible there. Another problem is that, as mentioned, the deduping feature is terrible and missed dozens of entries that should have been merged in my testing. I ended up spending an hour scrolling through my contacts list to clean it up.
What's the Ideal Contacts App?
In an ideal world, I want one list of contacts built by merging other contacts apps and databases that I already keep (Gmail, Facebook, Apple Contacts, Outlook, and so on). And I absolutely want the ability to access that list from any device, which means I want the data saved in the cloud.
I also want the ability to tell the mass to disregard or hide contact cards, en masse, that are missing key information that I choose. For example, if I have an email address saved as a contact, but no name or other information attached to it, get rid of it!
It would also be helpful if people could and would update their information on file from time to time, and while some companies have tried to build this feature into their apps, it never pans out for a number of reasons. Until that time, I guess the best method of keeping an address book up to date is to merge several sources into one and save it to the cloud.
For more backup coverage, please see our Beginner's Guide to PC Backup, Best Backup Software, and Best Online Backup Services stories.