You’ll have to use a method called CardDAV. For a Personal (Non-Google Apps) Google Account: Enabling this will make sure that your phone can manage your contacts while using cellular data, rather than having to wait for a wifi signal. Here’s a stumbling block that a lot of people have found – Go to Settings > Cellular and then scroll down until you see the slider beside Contacts. *Gmail automatically adds addresses to your Other Contacts list each time you use the Reply, Reply to all, or Forward functions to send mail to addresses that don’t already exist in your “My Contacts” list.
It will not sync your Other Contacts* or Google Plus Circles. Of note, no matter which Google method you use, your phone will only sync with your “My Contacts” in Google. For Google, the one you use depends on whether you’re using a personal Gmail (or ) account or a Google Apps account. There are two ways to sync your Google Contacts. Connect Your Google Contacts to Your iPhone This means that if you stop right now, any changes you make to contacts on your iPhone – or new contacts you add – will not show up in your Google Contacts on the web (and vice versa).įor Google, you’ll have to use separate protocols to sync contacts. Just because you connect your Gmail does not mean your Google contacts are connected as well. This is a key point, and a point of confusion and frustration for Google Contacts users. For Google accounts, I specifically add the “Mail” at the end of the description to remind me that the default connection only connects Mail and Calendar, not Contacts. I like to label the email accounts with simple names like “Work Mail,” “Personal Mail,” or “Junk Mail” to make it easy to find the right account in my iPhone inbox instead of trying to decipher between several similar email account names (like and for example). Tap Add Account…, select Gmail, and you’ll then be prompted to enter the relevant information, such as email address, password, and description. You’ll then see all of your connected email accounts listed under Accounts. Scroll down a bit until you see Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Connect Your Gmail to Your iPhoneįor the most part, this is pretty simple. For Google accounts specifically, you won’t be able to connect both your contacts and email in one step. This can be helpful when you don’t want to sift through a list of several thousand contacts (pulled from multiple Google accounts) to place a call. Instead, if you’re like me, you’d rather see a focused list of people with whom you might need to communicate while on the go.Īs you consider, it’s important to note that, on your iPhone, you can easily connect an email account without syncing the contacts. You probably don’t want all your contacts on your phone, because that will slow down the process of searching or scrolling through contacts to make a call. So which accounts should you connect to your phone? Each of these accounts has its own corresponding Google Contacts list. For example, I have a work Google Apps account, a personal Gmail account, and a separate personal Gmail account (reserved for beta signups, receipts, Craigslist sales, and other junk where I don’t want to give out my personal email). Many people have multiple Google accounts that include contact lists. If you’re an, Yahoo, or Hotmail user, don’t worry – we’ll help you out in a future blog post. This entire process will take 10-15 minutes max, and it will save you a lot of confusion later. In the meantime, we’ve written up a quick guide to help you get things set up right. We’re working on some new features for the Contact+ address book app that will make the process of syncing your contacts with an iPhone much, much easier.
This is a common pain point for iPhone users – especially compared to the relative ease of setting up an Android to sync with Google Contacts. We hear from a lot of folks who have trouble syncing their iPhone Contacts with their Google Contacts.
Just install Contacts+ For iOS and you can sync your contacts from Google, Twitter, and more. UPDATE: We’ve made it incredibly easy to sync your iPhone and Google contacts.