how to format phone numbers on iphone 6

You cannot. There is no way to change the standard formatting for a phone number in the contacts app. At least if your location/region is set in NA it will interpret the first 3 numbers as the area code and place them in parentheses.

How the numbers are formatted depends on your region setting. Settings>General>Language and Region. You can only change the region (which is not usually a good idea). You can't edit how they're formatted.

I just got this phone for work and this is ridiculous on the Android I used to be able to do 212.555.1212 or use whatever formatting I wanted to make it look cleaner. Is there an app that will allow you to format your own contacts. Looks like Apple went the route of KDE sticking to using system locale which is NOT preferred. For example, I am in US but like custom formats for various things (typically work logs, etc) e.g.: YYYY-MM-DD and HH24:MM:SS

As noted above, the only way to change things is to change your region settings which is not recommended for a number of reasons.

Submit your feedback to Apple requesting different features here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback

Your region settings are what could make the phone number format screwy...

Add the country code to the phone number for it to be represented in the standard format.

Thanks, I did. I basically said that relying on locale is wrong, it should be based on user preferences. (e.g.: time of %H:%M:%s; date of %Y-%m-%d). Who cares where I am from other than for timezone changes. Or rather, just use the (antiquated) locale standard to set up some defaults, and allow the user to tweak to his/her content. They don't even have the "C locale" which would get me half way there, I am stuck with the en_US locale.