Contact Groups Should Be Editable on iPhones... And Easier to Select
By
Staten Island, NY Posted: 4/11/2015 1:00:00 AM
The iPhone Contacts App does a horrible job of letting us organize contacts into groups like Family, Friends, or Business.
My contact list is way too big... and growing.
If you're like me, you've got a contact list that contains a mixture of family, friends and business contacts. I've had a smart phone since 2004. That's 3 years before the first iPhone came out, so my list has grown quite a bit in 14 years, and many of those contacts are older that that, because I had a PDA years before that.
Luckily, Apple has a feature called Groups that lets you place your contacts into groups, so you can see just the people in the groups you want when you go to the contact list. The trouble is that feature is completely half-baked. Frankly, it stinks.
First, you can only assign names to the groups from your desktop computer. That's inconvenient. You should be able to assign somebody as a business contact the moment you enter them, or you'll need to remember to make the change when you get back to your desk, which is completely useless.
One day, I decided to take some time to finally put at least some of my contacts into groups from my Mac. I picked a handful of names that were family members and created a group called Family. That seemed easy enough, and since I seldom add new family members, it was easy enough to assign them to a group.
Then I went to my iPhone to see if it made it easier to find my family on the contact list. It didn't.
Even if you take the time to assign your contacts into groups, the Contacts App on the iPhone does a crummy job of letting you see just the people in a group.
In order to see just my family members, I had to look for the Groups link, then unselect every group except Family. Once I was done, I had to re-select the other groups. That's a pain in the neck.
This is how it should work.
1. Whenever you edit a contact, you should be able to assign it one or more groups. Simple enough.
2. Whenever you are looking for a contact, you should be able to pick the group you want to see with a simple dropdown at the top which defaults to "ALL", then lets you pick one group at a time to view. So with one touch, you see the whole list, or just the group you are looking for, such as "Family".
For people involved in sales, this is even more important, because they could have more sales leads and business contacts in their phone than anything else. For them, it would be helpful to have even more categories such as Suppliers, Leads, VIPs, and Team Members.
Joe Crescenzi, Founder
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