iCloud contact labels changed with latest iOS 16 upgrade

I have the same symptoms, starting about 2 years ago. I think that does coincide with the installation of Outlook on my phone, so I can have my work calendar. I must have had about 50 custom labels. And gradually I am now down to about 10. I will not be able to recover about half of them, as I don’t know what they used to be. They have all been defaulted to phone.

I have also noticed another slightly different behavior I don’t see posted here. A couple of the numbers that lost their labels, have actually been altered themselves. It seems like the original labels have been appended to the number, along with some other characters. Now that is real data loss.

As much as I like having both my work and personal calendars in one app, so I easily see all appointments together, I deleted the iCloud calendar from Outlook a couple of days ago. So far so good. I’ll report back in another few days.

I should admit the few labels I re-entered, after removing iCloud from Outlook calendar, seem to be staying. The address country codes are also remaining uncorrupted.

But this is far from declaring victory. There’s no guarantee it won’t happen again. I wasn’t even syncing contacts, just calendars. And bottom line is that I have lost most of the rest of the labels, which I cannot recover. I also won’t be able to see the two calendars in the same app.

I would guess no one else here thinks “mobile” should be a custom label/field, either. But something somewhere is overwriting standard Apple field labels like phone, mobile, home, work, etc. as MOBILE, HOME, WORK, etc. but re-mapping them so original data is lost. Then, once you delete custom labels it re-maps them back to something it wasn’t before. E.G.: mobile becomes WORK and then phone. Or home (email) becomes HOME and then email. And almost never the same way each time.

Has anyone found a work around? This happened with either the 16.0 or 16.0.1 update and is still an issue with the recent 16.0.2 iOS build. It does not change every contact in every case but because it is unpredictable, it is worse. Apple patch needed to fix this as it does not seem to be anything a user can correct.

I, too, have this problem and it predates iOS 16. It's been happening for about two months on both the last two versions of iOS 15.6 and 15.7. I've had my IT department scratching their heads. I've deleted every single app on my phone that could be pushing this data into my contacts (Teams, Outlook App); I'm basically down to banking and airline apps at this point. I've tried turning off syncing contacts with iCloud, MS Exchange, etc. I spent an hour with Apple Support yesterday and we did a total reset reset of my 13PRO phone. The custom label data came back. Sometimes, I will delete the custom labels and it won't return for a couple of days. Other times, I will delete it and it comes back in less that 15 minutes, which was the case with Apple Support. Moreover, the custom label fields don't seem to come back in the same way every time - e.g. two days ago MOBILE, WORK, OTHER, EMAIL came back as choices. This morning, just MOBILE and HOME came back. Seems completely random.

I think that is also a connected issue. Seems like iOS has its own problem as well, acting similarly. I’ve been having issues for years likely caused by me using custom fields on iOS in which Outlook can’t deal with. Or tries to make a substitute. So I stopped using custom labels. My wife is having issues in which when she texts it is choosing a landline # instead of mobile when both appear in one contact and are properly labeled. This appears may be the iOS issue. She did have a iOS custom field issue the other day. She only has a few contacts with it. It was fixed by renaming the custom field back to something standardized. But iOS sending a text to the landline # seems like a iOS issue unless Outlook messed with the standardized field. I’m reading that may be the case in this thread and others. Apple and MS have stopped working well together a several years ago. I identified a calendar problem with repeating events. Apple does it one way and MS Outlook does it a different way. Only sometimes. For WEEKS I talked with upper level people in both companies. A MS upper level tech supervisor finally mentioned the two companies are not sharing teams any longer. Hope this gets fixed soon. Also, I do not have Outlook on my iPhone. I only have it on a Win 10&11 pc. Re: calendar refreshing. I’m finding I have to press the blue refresh button in Outlook app menu bar on the pc version yo force an update. Ordinarily, the data change would flow without doing that in less than 10 seconds. Messy stuff…

Hi everybody,

I've been experiencing this issue since a couple of months now, today I logged in my iCloud account and noticed that when there are more than one entry for phone numbers (e.g. home, work, mobile...) they are changed to the default labels from the dropdown menu (in the pic below they were originally home, mobile, main) moreover in case default labels are customized a text string is added to the phone number (in the pic below the customized label originally read "Cellulare")

same thing happens when the contact is a company (in this case the label has been changed to mobile and a text string added right after the number)

I have now fixed them in iCloud just to check how long it will last or to figure out what is the triggering event. Hopefully someone more professional than me can use this info to fix for good this annoying bug.

Feel free to ask any further detail if needed.

Macs

Hello,

so on friday i removed the icloud account from outllok and fixed all the broken contacts and everything was fine until last night. this morning I found out that the contacts labels are being rewritten again!! I called Apple support again and they told me that they don't have a solution for me at this time and that they are passing the problem on to engineers.

I am seeing a similar issue since maybe two weeks. Labels in my contacts seem to change randomly from "Mobil" (german label) to "MOBILE" or from "Arbeit" to "WORK" and similar. I see this effect for all kind of phone numbers, mail addresses and postal addresses. During last days I fixed the issue several times and at point in time it reverts back. I don't know when it happens. I am synchronizing one iPhone, one iPad, one MacBook Pro and a Samsung S10 to a Google Workspace account. During correcting this issue, I changed some information in the contacts. I checked all devices afterwards and on all devices there were current contact information. When it reverts back to "MOBILE","WORK"... it changes are also reverted. So for I example if I removed a postal address it is back again with the label change. I am not using Outlook in any kind. This happens for my Google Workspace contacts. I am not using iCloud Contacts. I have only one iCloud contact and it is me. It does not always happen to all accounts. Sometimes it is only few contacts, sometimes almost all.

Currently I have deactivated most of the devices for sync and only synchronize my iPhone contacts. I am excited what is going to happen in the next days...

I’ve cleaned up my contacts and eliminated Custom Labels like MOBILE and WORK. I was texting a contact today in iMessage who has two phone numbers in Contacts: iPhone and work. I was texting her and decide to call, so I clicked on her contact picture and clicked the telephone graphic. What popped up was her two phone numbers, both labeled as “phone.” This is what labels usually return to after being overwritten by Custom Label and cleared/reverted. I went to quickly check to see if the Custom Labels had come back, but no. I’m wondering if somehow the polluted data is cycling through the 30day back up of my iMessages, which is about the only thing I’m now backing up to iCloud. I tried deleting the text and rebooting my phone, but accessing her phone numbers through iMessage in this way still showed different labels than what’s actually in her Contact card. Maybe this is a clue? I’m going to turn off backing up my texts to iCloud to and delete her texts to see if this fixes the problem. Apple, there is definitely a glitch in your system, please help us.

Couple of comments: I don't think "mobile" would/should be considered a "custom field". I think custom fields would be, ie., "Bob's mobile" and "Cathy's mobile" for when you had a couple in one record. I'm having the same problem as you and many others. I am seeing "iPhone" as a label and I don't think I created that as a Custom field...possibly I did. I'm also having Outlook issues regarding some things and I don't have enough data to determine if it is an issue with MS or if it is part of Outlook syncing. I talked with Apple today and all they were able to find was yes, they are working on it.

I have read a lot of these posts and there are several in which users stopped using iCloud for syncing and relied on Google contacts and possibly other contact tools and the contacts remained stable and unchanged after the move. I am not entirely convinced MS Office (whether 365 or newer Outlook app) is without some level of blame in this situation. I have had numerous issues going back a year or two in which the two have displayed syncing problems with repeating calendar events as well as contacts, in which the user created a custom, personalized field to store phone #'s in which Outlook did not know how to handle the Apple latitude of creating custom fields. That being said, this whole iCloud contact mess may have come out of an effort to work around Outlook contact syncing with Apple iPhone custom fields. Or Apple just wrecked it and still doesn't know how to fix it. It has been going on since iOS 16 was released.

However, there are many posts here in which the users have indicated they do not use Outlook. Which clearly points to an Apple problem.

I stopped backing up my contacts to iCloud a while ago. Eventually, the problem comes back - sometimes it takes three weeks.

The last I looked into this, all the contacts must reside in iCloud to use custom labels. I think I used my MacBook to move my contacts. It looks to me that Apple is trying to push the use of iCloud.