Best Address Book App for IPhone
We’ve seen loads of address book apps for the iPhone, but most of them ran into difficulties because they rely on social media integration, which tends to break after a few months. Because of this, we like Simpler Contacts, which makes things easy, but has enough features to differentiate it from the default app.
Simplified contacts
Platform : iPhone / iPad Price : $ 4.99 / free download page
Functions
- Easy contact merge for duplicate contacts
- Various search options
- Quickly create a contact group
- Group text messaging and email for groups
- Back up contacts using Dropbox, Google Drive or email
- Filter parameters to find people by job title or company
- Filter contacts by birthday
- Favorites menu for quick access
- Find contacts without names, phone number or email
- Smart dialer
Where is it best
Simpler lives up to its name by being a simple address book that is easy to use. Once you’ve imported your contacts into it, you can quickly start searching them, creating groups, and removing duplicates. The best feature is group management, which allows you to create groups of people to send group texts or emails. Plus, Simpler’s filters come in handy when you’re trying to find a contact with a specific job title or just want a quick peek at upcoming birthdays. It’s also nice that you can back up and export your contacts to various services, so if you decide to stop using the app (or keep iOS altogether), it’s easy to import your contacts elsewhere.
Where it fails
Simpler Contacts doesn’t integrate with social media like many other address book apps. But it’s better that way, because these apps rarely keep up with changing API settings on social media. Simpler also doesn’t have any of the more cool features like adding contacts from business cards or organizing contacts with tags, so if you’re trying to manage thousands of contacts, Simpler won’t make your life much easier than the default app.
Competition
FullContact (Free) is slightly more feature-rich than Simpler, but not as elegant to use. A big step is adding “context for contacts” where you can see the latest tweets or Facebook updates, and add tags so that contacts are organized into different groups. It also syncs between Google, iOS and FullContact itself, which is handy if you have a lot of contacts in different locations.
Connect (Free) is a simple contact manager, but that is what makes it one of the best. Unlike other apps that integrate many social media profiles into your address book, Connect just uses the iPhone’s address book and makes it better. From the app, you can instantly call, write, write or email a contact. You can also easily create your own groups to make it easier to connect with people (and also make group messaging a little easier). If you are not interested in social features, then Connect is the address book you are looking for.