How to Transfer iOS Contacts to Android

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How to Transfer iOS Contacts to Android

How to Transfer iOS Contacts to Android

It is no secret that Android is rising above iOS in many ways. While there are always some exchanges in the user-base, we find that people switching over from iOS to Android is growing rapidly. Unfortunately, that migration is marred by some simple problems in moving their data from iOS to Android.

Some people end up not switching to Android simply because of these roadblocks in transferring data. As great as Android is, it wasn’t built to play along with iOS. They are completely different platforms. One of the things people want to transfer is their contacts. It can be quite a pain if you don’t know what you are doing. Some even resort to simply manually recreating their contact list in Android. That isn’t intuitive at all. So, here are some great ways to transfer your iOS contacts to Android.

Things you might need:

  • An Android Device
  • A Google Account
  • An iOS Device
  • iCloud
  • A Web Browser

Backing up Contacts from iOS

It’s quite bothersome to manually transfer each and every contact from your iOS device to an Android device. This can be grueling for people like me who hold about a few hundred contacts in their library. What we want is for you to back up your contacts to the iCloud. Some people may be thinking, “What about iTunes?” Well, they used to have a way of doing all this with iTunes, but Apple seems to have removed that “Sync to Google” option. Oh well.

Most people already use the iCloud to back up their files and PIM information. Naturally, your contacts list should be there too.

iCloud Contacts

What you want to do is to select all the contacts you wish to transfer or copy to Android and tap on the Export vCard option. This will back up all contacts in a small file that we will make use of later.

Importing Contacts to Google Account

Your next agenda is to import the contacts you backed up to your Google Account. Why a Google Account? Simply because you won’t be able to utilize Android to the fullest without it so you most definitely will have one when you transfer to Android. Another reason is because Google’s ecosystem of online apps is pretty much the iCloud of Android. Everything important like contacts data get synchronized across all your Android devices through Google’s services.

Google contacts

All you need to do here is to open the Google Contacts site and simply tap on the “More” button and choose “Import”. You would then be asked to choose the file you wished to import to your Android contacts. It is pretty obvious that you should now pick that file that we took out of your iCloud and let it import to the Google Contacts.

Getting Rid of Duplicates

Here’s a cool feature of Google Contacts. Sometimes, we may have saved some numbers or contacts more than once. Maybe at one point, you created a contact with different names, but the same contact number. It may be intended, but some may also be due to some naming conventions like maybe using a nickname for one and a stage name for the other. Regardless of the reason, duplicate contacts do happen.

In case you already had contacts in your Google account like I did, you may find that after importing, there are now duplicate contacts in your list. What you can do is simply tap on “More” and choose “Find & merge duplicates”.

Syncing to Android

Now, what you want to do is to have those contacts appear on your Android device. Thankfully, this process could be automatic as soon as you imported the files to Google Contacts. In case you don’t see these changes, all you need to do is to go to Settings > Accounts > Google > Accounts > Your Gmail Account.  Make sure the Contacts option is marked with a check to ensure that it synchronizes with Google.

contacts sync

Importing to Android without Google

This may sound odd, but there are devices out there without Google synchronization available. They probably chose not to, or they are using an Android device that uses a fork of the OS and does not include any Google Apps. Regardless of the reason for not having Google, you can still import contacts manually to your Android device.

What you need to do is to copy the contacts backup file you have straight to your Android device’s memory. Place it somewhere you can easily find it. Make sure it is in your internal memory space. Now go to your contacts application. Open the menu and choose Import/export.  From there, choose import from storage.  Depending on your Android version, it may ask you to manually choose the contacts file or it may automatically scan the memory for compatible contact backups. Choose the backups you want and let your phone do its thing.

Import Contacts Android

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