I recently got into heated argument with Siri about whether or not I had entered an important contact’s phone number into my Contacts app – the native address book on the iPhone. It turned out that Siri was right (I hadn’t entered the number) but I couldn’t prove it to myself until I was off the freeway. It was a pretty icy drive home, Siri with arms crossed staring out the passenger window and not saying a word.
For me the make-or-break point for any Address Book app is that it absolutely must sync to the Contacts database. That way I can fire off a text, email or phone call while I’m driving. To be more particular about it, a successful iPhone Address Book app must sync with the Contacts database in iCloud. This way I can update a contact anywhere and have it available everywhere.
The Unicorn in the Room – A Universal Social Network Hub
But what I want, what I really, really want is to have one place where I can manage all my conversations whether they are on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, email, Slack, Hipchat or your phone.
An address book won’t do that. To manage your complex conversational ecosystems you need some kind of Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) software. And to date none of the products in that category will update the Contacts app on your iPhone.
So until somebody builds the unicorn of relationship management software the first step for anybody interested in doing some professional (or personal) networking is to make sure their Address Book is reasonably up to date.
What’s Wrong with the iPhone Contacts App?
YOU CAN’T MANAGE GROUPS IN IPHONE’S CONTACTS APP. Let’s say you meet somebody at a conference, you exchange email address and phone numbers and you want to flag their contact information for a future call. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to tag them with an “FU” or whatever name you’d prefer to represent “follow-up?”
You can’t create an email group for your design team while you’re sitting in an airport, you can’t send a group text to all the members of your Family minus one (for whom you’re planning a surprise party.)
For all these reasons you really need a third party Address Book that 1) syncs with iCloud and 2) manages Groups.
FullContact – A Clear Winner…Almost
FullContact is the alt-address book that I want to love. It’s fast, clean and exceptionally well designed. FullContact scours the internet and automatically improves contact information. Sweet.
The app also merges duplicates. FullContact gives you precise control over the information you want to merge or update – something every other app with “magical AI” lacks.
FullContact manages Groups just fine even though it calls them “Tags.” The app can even sync your contacts in iCloud with Google Contacts and make sure the Groups/Labels are the same. Bravo.
So what’s the problem? SYNC IS HORRIBLE. It can take hours, sometimes days for data to migrate from FullContact to the Contacts database or back the other way. Most of the address books listed below sync INSTANTLY.
While I’m drawn to FullContact’s well executed design I’m afraid that its laggy sync behavior could pose a huge problem during the Zombie Apocalypse.
Address Book Runners Up
The address book app I’m leaning toward adopting is A2Z Contacts . The user interface is a little fugly in my opinion but the app satisfies the Minimum Viable Product threshold. I can enter contacts, organize them, tag them, set up new groups. On top of this the A2Z help FAQ is very, very helpful…bordering on insightful.
Syncs with Contacts instantly.
Connect is another “good enough” address book app that lets you organize groups by color. The downfall of Connect is that it only has five preset-labels for social media services and one of those is…Game Center!?!!!!
You can add other social media links like Instagram or Snapchat in the URL field but it makes me throw up a little in my mouth every time I have to do that.
Also syncs with Contacts instantly.
Covve bills itself as the “The smartest, simplest contacts app.” Like FullContact the Covve app has a cloud component and can automatically improve your contacts with information scraped from the web. Accepting the changes is an all-or-nothing affair and Covve doesn’t always guess right.
One cool thing that Covve does is capture news alerts related to the people in your Address Book. On your desktop computer you can view these alerts in a web browser and take actions based on your contact’s personal information.
Covve suffers the same sluggish sync problems as FullContact but the real dealbreaker for me is that Covve “tags” don’t correspond to Groups on your iPhone.
Interesting Things that Aren’t Address Books
CircleBack promises “Effortless Contacts.” It updates your contact list with information captured from email signatures and other places on the web. When it works it’s great. Unfortunately I keep having to update the same six contacts over and over. CircleBack doesn’t interact with your iCloud Groups and you can’t add new individual contacts from within the app.
Ryze ingests contacts from your Contacts database but it doesn’t send updates back. For this reason it feels a little bit like an address book but it really is a personal CRM. Ryze has a simple workflow that nudges you to keep in touch with your contacts on a schedule that you define. But even though Ryze looks like an address book it doesn’t sync back to your Contacts database and should be considered a stand-alone product. There isn’t yet a MacOS or browser version of the app, which limits its utility.
Any one of these apps is worth a look. For me the choice falls between A2Z and FullContact.
In a follow up post I’ll discuss address books that run on MacOS.
