Sharing contacts with your spouse in 2022?

June 19, 2022 6:43 PM

I want to share contacts from my iPhone with my spouse (who also has an iPhone), but am having trouble finding a way to do that. There doesn't seem to be a "family sharing" kind of mechanism built into iOS or iCloud, unless I've missed it. What is the most robust and easiest way to do it?

We don't want to delete any contacts she already has on her phone. Bidirectional sharing would be nice, but I'd settle for just being able to add my contacts to her phone. I don't mind paying for 3rd-party software if there's something that would actually do this.

posted by StrawberryPie to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

You should be able to use Google contacts to sync that.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-other-contact-accounts-iph14a87326/ios
posted by kschang at 8:59 PM on June 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

You can do this on both iOS and macOS using the ability of Contacts to work with more than one address book account. You and your spouse keep your existing accounts, but create an additional shared account (this third account can be on iCloud or any other supported service such as Google). You setup each device with two accounts. You setup your device to use your account and the shared account and you setup your spouse's device to use their account and the shared account. You probably want to set the family account to be the default account so that newly created contacts end up, by default, in the family account. For the cleanest approach that eliminates all duplicates you want your account to only have your contact and your spouse's contact with you as the "Me" contact and your spouse's account should only have her contact and your contact with her as the "Me" account. All other contacts are in the shared account. See Create a Shared Family Address Book with Contacts and iCloud for the gruesome details.

Make frequent backups during the setup so you don't lose any contacts!
posted by RichardP at 9:35 PM on June 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

I asked a similar question a while back, and Shared Contacts Manager was one recommendation that I've been looking at. I keep meaning to set it up but haven't yet—maybe this will motivate me to do it.

This should really be a core Google or iCloud feature, but for some reason it's just... not.

Personally, I didn't want to create an extra Google or iCloud account just to share contacts.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:01 AM on June 22, 2022 [1 favorite]