iOS 16: Redesigned Group Management in Contacts

iOS 16 has made major improvements in the way the Contacts App works. In previous versions you could group contacts into named lists. This aligned with Mac Contacts. But there was a difference; in Mac contacts (and iCloud contacts) you could assign a contact to a group, and move it from one group to another. You could not do this with Contacts in iOS; the only way to move contacts between groups was with a 3rd party app such as “Groups”. And a new contact would be automatically added to whatever group was the “default” in Settings/Contacts.

Now, in iOS 16, “groups” are gone, and are replaced with Lists; Lists serve a similar function to Groups, but are much more powerful:

When you tap on Lists you see this:

You can also create new lists by clicking on Add List. I have added the list “VIP”; I’ll explain why in a moment:

Now, when viewing a contact you can choose a new list for it, or add it to a list; that is, a contact can belong to multiple lists (or groups).

When you tap Add to List the available lists appear; you can select a list, or add a list.

Back to why I created the list VIP. Because iOS 16 allows a contact to be in multiple lists, I created the VIP list as a way to add a selected group of users to the Allowed users in Do Not Disturb. Remember, that a contact can now be on more than one list! This is important in Do not Disturb, because there is no way to say that only an arbitrary list of users can call you when DND is enabled; previously DND had a very limited number of choices for allowed callers (Everyone, No One, Favorites, All Contacts). iOS 16 extends this by letting you choose any list of Contacts to override DND, but still not specific users. By creating the VIP list you can add a list of callers that don’t fall into any other category, and choose a group -er, List- that are allowed to call you, as below:

This is a great new feature in iOS. Let’s hope it comes to Mac Contacts with the release of Ventura!