Contacts app hangs after macOS 27 update (Beach Ball issue)

Have you rebooted your Mac? If not, that's the first step. If that does not help, then see if the problem is present when you boot in safe mode. That process performs some system cleanup and clears caches, and also disables 3rd party extensions that may cause problems.

Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support

If that does not correct the issue, test in a new user account. A newly-created user account will have all settings at default, and if the issue does not occur in that new account then it provides guidance on what may need to be changed to correct the issue.

Add a user or group on Mac - Apple Support

Once the testing is complete, the new account can easily be deleted.

Delete a user or group on Mac – Apple Support

Those steps will help to isolate the problem.

It might help to download and run EtreCheck, written by a long-time forum member. The free version is fine. Post the full report using the Additional Text button. No personal information is revealed. 

Personally, the Contacts app is working normally for me on macOS 27 Golden Gate.

I did the delete of the plist, and reboot a few times with no success.

The contact that was on my screen had a comment with a bunch of JSON in it, and the search bar had a key from the json in it. I couldn't clear the search since contacts immediately locked up. And what eventually fixed my problem was going to another MacBook on my account deleting the JSON from the contact, removing those plists again, rebooting the computer and when it opened up again, I was able to use Contacts and it wasn't locking up.

In a database design... when describing a "contact", the word contact is the entity. An entity is something you can hug (in general... you can't hug a company, but it's often an entity). Each entity has a number of attributes. Attributes for contacts (in the Apple world) are defined as... First (name), Last (name), Company, Phone, Email, Street and so on. The last Attribute on a Contact instance (card) is "note". The note attribute is a freeform character string of variable length. It allows all of us to put in values that are words and numbers that can be searched when trying to find a contact card. I personally, was guilty of using the note attribute to store some historic data of a contact (not what it was designed for) that had gotten out of hand. I kept adding history because it was working and allowed me to find this contact from the search bar. Prior to version macOS Golden Gate 27.0.0 everything worked fine. I knew which contact had the super long "note" attribute. So I exported all my contacts for back up. Went to the Contacts app in iCloud. Deleted the note attribute data from the contact that had 2,000+ characters in it. Deleted "com.apple.AddressBook.plist" and then had the contact app rebuild the database on the MacBook. We should not have to do this. Again, values or variable sizes of attributes should not send software into a loop, but that is what I think is going on. Entity Attribute Relationship Database design 101

BobCassidy wrote:

I tried that and it worked for a couple of days and now it's back to the spinning beachball. Apple really needs to fix this!

Try deleting that file again. And then immediately reboot into Safe Mode. Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support Some have suggested leaving the Mac in Safe Mode for about 30 minutes as it can take a little time for it to clear out old cache files.

Why might this work? Because booting into Safe Mode deletes some caches while also doing some minor disk repairs if any are needed. The removal of caches may help your Mac to "forget" about that corrupted file you deleted, which could have been retained in a cache and reaccessed causing the problem to reappear.

Doing this might not resolve your version of this problem, but it might, and it certainly does no harm, Safe Mode is an Apple supported and recommended procedure for anomalies like this.

I had the same issue with Contacts hanging after migrating to refurbished MacBook Air M1.

I performed all the tests, to no avail.

Then I removed both the 'com.apple.AddressBook.plist' and 'com.apple.AddressBook.abd.plist' from the Library, by dragging them to the desktop.

Then I restarted, and Contacts opened right up, and was 100% synched correctly.

Hope this helps someone else!

Yes, pretty sure the issue is the updated Contacts software can not handle an individual contact (sometimes Apple calls them "cards" sometimes they are called "records") with a Notes attribute length of more than 1,000 (not sure what this number actually is, could be 2,000... but you know which contact has this one note). Yes, software should not be caught in an endless loop because of the value of a data attribute or because past versions supported higher variable-length attributes, but that is the issue. You have to shorten this one contact "card" (or multiple cards), then scratch the files to be recreated. Hopefully, it may be resolved in future updates, but it is such a key app for everyday use it is hard to wait. Not everyone has this issue because not every individual has leveraged Note attribute length in the past. Good luck.

Bob, pretty sure the issue is the updated Contacts software can not handle an individual contact (sometimes Apple calls them "cards" sometimes they are called "records") with a Notes attribute length of more than 1,000 (not sure what this number actually is, could be 2,000... but you know which contact has this one note). Yes, software should not be caught in an endless loop because of the value of a data attribute or because past versions supported higher variable-length attributes, but that is the issue. You have to shorten this one contact "card" (or multiple cards), then scratch the files to be recreated. Hopefully, it may be resolved in future updates, but it is such a key app for everyday use it is hard to wait. Not everyone has this issue because not every individual has leveraged Note attribute length in the past. Good luck.

macOS 27.2 seems to have resolved this problem.

I just installed 27.2 and no spinning beachball ... yet. Keeping my fingers crossed! For all of you still having this problem, please update and let us know if it's solved.

help please: I cannot locate the "com.apple.AddressBook.plist" file on my MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021) M1 chip.

So far I've been down this rabbit hole:

"To delete a .plist file on a Mac, you must navigate to the Library folder, open the Preferences directory, locate the specific .plist file associated with your app, and move it to the Trash."

I did this even with the Option key held down and didn't see a com.apple.AddressBook.plist file.

Ideas?

Thanks!