4 Ways to Transfer Contacts from iPhone to iPhone

We know that everything connect to your Apple ID is easy to be transferred to your new iPhone through iCloud or iTunes. Yet sometimes one wants to set a whole new iPhone by linking the new device to a new Apple account. If you need only the contacts from the old iPhone, and you don’t want to restore all things from iTunes or iCloud to the new iPhone, you can follow this article. This post here is to show how to transfer contacts from iPhone to iPhone.

How to Move Contacts Only between iPhone

It’s well known that iCloud can be used for syncing data to cloud from several iOS devices, and iCloud is one of the easiest way to back up or restore iOS device. The following first two methods also use iCloud to migrate contacts, so you need to sign in iCloud on your new iPhone first. After successfully transferring contacts, you can sign out iCloud at any time and switch account to sync contacts.

Method 1: Sync Contacts to iPhone via iCloud

The easiest way to transfer contacts is using iCloud. After set up a new iPhone, Log in your old iCloud, and keep connecting network, then your contacts should be synced to your new iPhone in minutes. If not, go to Settings > Apple ID > iCloud, and turn “Contacts” then on, and choose “Merge” if it ask you to merge contacts or not, then you can have all your contacts on your new iPhone. 

Note: Other things like notes or photos you've synced with iCloud might be also transferred to the new iPhone. You can delete them after you sign out of the old iCloud account.

Method 2: Restore Contact Archive from iCloud.com

Besides restoring from iCloud backup, there is another feature in iCloud allowing users to restore only contacts without resetting the whole device.

1. First you need to log in the old Apple account on your new iPhone and sign out that account on your old iPhone.
2. Go to iCloud.com and sign in with the same account, and then go to Settings > Advanced.
3. Click “Restore Contacts”, if there’s no archive available, skip to the next method.

Note: This method will first wipe your existing contacts on your new iPhone. If you really want to follow this way and find out "No Archive Avaliable" sign, you can go to your old iPhone Settings > Apple ID > iCloud and turn "Contacts" off and then on, and go to iCloud Backup to click "Back Up Now".

Method 3: Extract Contacts from iPhone as CSV or vCard file

If the methods above won’t work, there’s still a way for you. iCloud allows users to upload contacts and then sync with device. This method also can be used to recover contacts when your iPhone is lost or locked.

Preparation: You first need a utility to extract contacts from iPhone or iPhone bakcup. Here use Gihosoft iPhone Data Recovery as an example.

• Step 1: Run iPhone Contact Recovery on computer and select “Contacts”.
• Step 2: Plug in iPhone to scan it for contacts; if you lost your iPhone, you can choose to “View iTunes Backup” or “View iCloud Backup”.
• Step 3: Click “Recover” to export contacts as CSV or vCard file to computer.
• Step 4: Sign into iCloud.com with your new Apple ID, go to Contacts, and click the left corner to upload the contacts file to iCloud.
• Step 5: Wait iCloud to sync contacts to your new iPhone (remember also sign into the new account on the phone).

Note: If Contacts app on your new iPhone didn’t sync with iCloud, you can go to Settings > Apple ID > iCloud to turn Contacts off and then on, and click “Merge” if there’s a prompt ask you to merge or not.

Method 4: Using other cloud apps like Google Drive

Besides iCloud, some cloud service like Google Drive can be used to transfer contacts between iPhone. Also, Google account can be used to transfer contacts and photos between Android and iOS if you need.

• Step 1: Go to iPhone Settings > Account & Passwords (iOS11), and click “Add Account”.
• Step 2: Enter your Gmail account and password, and then complete the setup. (Enable Advanced Settings > SSL, port 443.)
• Step 3: If you’ve installed Google Contacts app, open it and it should automatically sync your contacts.
• Step 4: Also add the Gmail account on your another iPhone, and then you can get all contacts.

More:

1. The official Apple guide for transferring data from Android to iPhone: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201196.
2. Google Contacts also allows users to upload contact CSV and vCard files, so the last two methods can also be used to transferred contacts from iPhone to Android. You may also want to know how to sync iPhone contacts to Gmail.
3. You can also use the Gihosoft iPhone Recovery software to retrieve lost/deleted contacts from iPhone or iPad and then re-upload them to iCloud.