iPhone keeps changing contacts phone label

I have to same problem, which has only being occurring for a couple of months. Every so many hours/days all my contact phone, address, email labels change. (These are standard apple labels NOT custom labels)

i.e. phone numbers marked as mobile, home, work etc. all change to "telephone". addresses marked in the same way, change to "Address" and email addresses marked in the same way change to "email". They're for when I ask Siri to call someone at home, or give me directions to someones house, she can't do so as all labels have been modified to the ones mentioned above.

I should mention that I use iCloud to sync all my devices, iPhone, iPad, iPad Pro, Mac and two windows PC's using apples iCloud sync. This is a new problem and only started a couple of months ago. I modify them back and then after a few days later it happens again.

One last thing. It does not affect all my address book, it only seems to be people on my favourite list.

Thankyou.

I have the same problem with labels changing for phones, addresses and emails in my contacts, after several attempts of un-syncing and re-syncing contacts to my iCloud without any success, I went to accounts in Settings and deselected contacts for my Microsoft and Google accounts, it seems there might be conflict issue that merge labels for contacts between accounts (this shouldn’t be possible), but for some reason I can now edit contacts on my iCloud list without any more changes or reverting labels for contacts incorrectly.

I am in the same boat. Extremely frustrating. Can no longer ask Siri to call an office number or mobile for a given contact, because all contacts labels have changed to “phone.” Have tried many different solutions, some of which work for a while and then default back to erasing all labels. I last isolated to have only iCloud mail contacts and no Outlook contacts, so it appears to be an Apple issue.

Some of the fixes posted seem to be workarounds. Dreading having to change labels again with no ownership and resolution of this issue by Apple.

Any updates from others will be appreciated.

I too had this problem. What I’ve noticed is no matter how many times you sync or unsync your MacBook to your phone, your contacts almost never save correctly to your MacBook at least not all of them anyway.

So if you’re only concerned about the phone portion of saving contacts here what I did. I use the mail app for all of my e-mail accounts. When you’re adding various email accounts to your mail app it ask you if you would like to sync contacts, notes, calendar etc. before you save your email account make sure you toggle off contacts. The only e-mail that should sync your contacts is your iCloud email.

HERES HOW:

1.You go to setting.

2. Scroll down to mail.

3.Click on accounts.

4.Click on the email and turn off contacts.

If you have multiple emails do this with all e-mails!

If you’re ever in your contacts and notice that you can press the back button and it shows you all your contacts but in various e-mail settings this is because all of your emails are synced to your contacts.

PLEASE MAKE SURE THAT THE EMAIL YOU WANT TO SYNC YOUR CONTACTS WITH HAS ALL OF YOUR CONTACTS SAVED!

This was not case for me so I had to re-save the the other portion of my contacts in the e-mail I wanted to sync them with, which in this case would be my icloud.

HERES HOW:

1. Go to contacts
2. Click on the back arrow ( You will see all contacts and contacts in your other e-mails )
3. Choose the e-mail you want to sync your contacts to. Make sure they’re all there. If not add them.)
4. Go to your settings and do the previous steps mentioned above in my comment.

I REALLY HOPE THIS HELPS!

This worked for me for about 2 weeks and now they’re all back to “phone” again.

Settings>Mail>Accounts>Gmail (in this example)>toggle Contacts off. See below.

I tried this simpler approach but it did not work for me and my custom labels would revert and delete after 24 to 48 hours, but the very long and involved fix I posted above did work for me and I have had zero issues since I posted it over two months ago. 99.9% sure Outlook is the culprit and the problem in my case.

Yep! They can’t fix or truly advise what is causing this. So frustrating.

this is happening to me too. 5th time today! Apple has no idea....

A name of a person in my contact list comes out as the phone number not the name ?

It happened to me in december 2023 and now today. Is it still working for you fine so I can follow your steps?

Same here. All phone numbers revert to ‘phone’ label and all addresses revert to ‘address’ label, and Siri (nor me) can’t work out which is which when I want to call a personal mobile or a work mobile!

I have the same issue. Someone suggested to add custom labels which I did but and it helped for a while , now its back to changing labels non stop!

it started with updates ios 16

Let me know when and if you find a solution

You have to go to your iPhone settings. Scroll all the way down until you see App Store, wallet Apple Pay, and passwords it will be under that. Click mail and then click the email you want and then turn off contacts. It’s very easy.

In your contacts you would press list at the top right corner.

I ran into the same issue and found a fix:

Contact > select the contact you want to change > Edit > scroll down all the way to the bottom > linked contacts > remove them all except icloud > save

now all your changes will stay.

it seems to me that if there is a conflict between these linked contacts iphone will set the label to something else.

I use an Apple Mac, Ipad and Iphone and an MS365 account. I synchronize my calendar and mail with MS 365, but all my Contacts are exclusively sync'd to ICloud.

I went though the same steps @Ceelo456 describes further down, but did not turn sync off - and lo and behold, the problem resurfaces. Not only do most phone records show "Phone" as the label on all phone records and "email" for mail addresses, but other unwanted content is added to fields such as Home page or Notes:

Example for home page: "ms-outlook://people/AAMkADAzZDRjZTJkLWE2M2MtNGNjZC1hMmE2LTliYWE2MTljNWQwNABGAAAAAABCNosj6vtJSoWgCSpdizWABwCEV_ZvxHQlSLj2H_TbCIySAB_52TPVAADO4beWQRtVR6hgQKAMG0R1AADPHvkDAAA=?accountKey=635cd221d37d688bff64e46d081e0e5f&accountExportedAt=608406150.56672"

Example for an inserted Note: "This contact is read-only. To make changes, tap the link above to edit in Outlook." (The note is not even true. Outlook does not have these Contacts, as I do not synchronize Contacts with Outlook or MS 365)

Another problem I encountered was that, while Contacts app allows me to select and delete several Contacts together, it will not allow me to select/Delete ALL Contacts at once. This is something I would want to do, after extracting and cleaning my 2'000+ contacts, and before re-importing them.

May I kindly ask Apple to take a REAL interest in getting the label problem solved. It would also help if Apple could provide an Export function with csv files, and allow a full ALL Contacts delete that I can extract, cleanse and the re-import.