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How to remove duplicate contacts - Mojave to Monterey upgrade

After upgrading a Macbook air OS from Mojave to Monterey last night, all of my contacts are duplicated on the iPhone. I tried the the applications>contacts>card>find duplicates approach but it only grabbed a small number. What is the solution here to remove them en masse? Thanks.

iPhone XR, iOS 14

Posted on Oct 28, 2021 12:37 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 30, 2021 3:38 AM

Yes, the phone, iPad and Mac are all synced. I ended up contacting support. A Mgmt level advisor fixed it via screen sharing. I believe we did essentially what you described — we removed one of the lists on iCloud and then merged dupes and it cleaned it up.


thanks for your helpful reply!

4 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 30, 2021 3:38 AM in response to AnnieL2

Yes, the phone, iPad and Mac are all synced. I ended up contacting support. A Mgmt level advisor fixed it via screen sharing. I believe we did essentially what you described — we removed one of the lists on iCloud and then merged dupes and it cleaned it up.


thanks for your helpful reply!

Oct 29, 2021 1:25 PM in response to Tommy7799

Hi there Tommy7799, 


We understand that on your iPhone you are seeing duplicate contacts. Are you seeing them anywhere else? 


Do you sync your contacts with iCloud or any other accounts? You can check that in Settings > Contacts > Accounts by seeing which accounts Contacts are enabled on. 


If they are enabled for more than one account, let’s toggle off the one you prefer not to use and see if that changes anything. 


You may also find this helpful - Hide duplicate contacts on iPhone


Thank you. 

Dec 2, 2021 8:17 PM in response to Tommy7799

I've had an open ticket with Apple for three weeks. After the upgrade, contacts duplicated, or were missing. iCloud and Phone now sync, but Mac Contacts has a different list of contacts. Apple restored my Mac, and reinstalled Montery to try to resolve the issue, but it seemed to compound it. Apple now says the problem is with the 3rd party providers and I need to contact them and then remove contacts in their systems to resolve the problem. We have spent many many hours of screen sharing, removing duplicates, merging, rebuilding groups that were deleted, etc, but nothing resolves the issue. After many hours of me rebuilding the contacts list to the best of my ability, I think my iCloud has usable info. (as said, there is different data in the Mac Contacts) -- and I'm so afraid another tweak will put me back to an unusable contact list.. They are indicating Apple cannot help anymore - I am unsure how to find, or talk, to a real person at Google or Microsoft, and afraid to turn someone else loose on my computer... I don't know where to go for help.

How to remove duplicate contacts - Mojave to Monterey upgrade

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