The Misuse of iOS Contacts

5 min readJul 3, 2020

There are very harmful misuses of technology. The militarization of AI, tracking protestors across social media, etc. This post is apart of a series about the unique and ‘cool’ misuses of technology by the common user.

When developing a product, it’s very easy to get stuck in a build, build, build mindset. You try to see the product from the user’s perspective and add features and tools that you, yourself, would use.

The user is resilient; the user is smart. Within the constraints of your product, they find ways to mutate and misuse your program to fit their specific needs.

The iOS Contacts app

I would argue that the contacts app on iOS may be the most decrepit on the platform. Since Steve Jobs presented it on stage in 2007, no major changes have occurred. The app is a linear list of alphabetically sorted contacts saved by the user.

There are a lot of fields you can customize (Company, Address, Website, &c) but when the user sees a contact they see three things:

First Name
Last Name
Contact Photo

20 feet out, this is all you need to identify a person. This assumption has facilitated the misuse of contacts.

Some of my favorite examples:

Ryan Tinder vs. Ryan Work

You can fill out the company section on someone’s contact information but that’s not what appears when sending a message or receiving a call. Because of this, people sometimes replace the last name with an identifying feature. You don’t know Ryan Davis but you do know Ryan from Tinder.

WORK (ANSWER ANSWER ANSWER ANSWER ANSWER)

How do you save the number of the store you work at? They don’t have a first or last name. How do you add a sense of urgency? Putting in your work’s number as ALL CAPITOL LETTERS alarms you. If you’re getting a call from your job, you should be alarmed. You probably slept through your shift or got fired.

tucker european, tucker iphone, tucker, tucker 12/10/16, tucker 12/22/16, …

My brother has changed his number… a lot. I could have deleted his current number and added a new one but, as some of these numbers were temporary, I needed a history in case he went back. If I appended each new number to his contact, instead of deleting, what would happen when I hit call? Which number is his number?

###-###-####

Sometimes it’s too much work to save a contact. This is especially true when at conferences or dating around and you’re only conversing with people for a short amount of time. It can be easier to associate some parts of the number with a person than to save a new contact.

“404 ending in 7… oh that’s Julia from breakfast”

Maybe there’s a permanence to contacts that can lead to a reluctance to add new ones.

all lower case, no last name, no image

Harking back to the permanence of contacts, the contacts in my phone are a rolling list of acquaintances all the way back to my middle school days on a Second Generation iPod Touch.

Back then, I liked the aesthetic of all lowercase characters and no last name. Until the iPhone 6 Plus came out, no contact images appeared in the messages app — there was no need to save them.

Almost a decade later, every new contact I add is formatted in lowercase and (usually) forgoes a last name and image.

In iOS 13, Apple added the ability to share contact cards.

These contact cards have images, First Names, Last Names and proper capitalization. Because of that, I refuse to add in these new contact cards.

adding contacts via the Phone app

Look at the difference in adding a contact in through the Phone app versus the Contacts app.

Phone app vs Contacts APp — Phone App (left) Contacts App (right)

Giving someone your number by creating a contact into someone else’s phone adds unnecessary complexity. “Do they know my last name?”, “Should I put an emoji?”, “Do I add a photo?”, “What photo do I add?”…

To avoid this, many people just open the phone app and ask you to add your number there. After typing in your number, you hand the phone back and they fill out the contact card.

Why?

Products today automate more and more processes from the user. On most social media platforms you are stuck with the name that person wants you to see, Medium chooses a font, weight and size for you, TikTok decides what you like and what to show you, Google Photos automates albums and categories, &c. This automation limits user freedom.

When a user is forced to organize their own data, they find clever ways to solve their problems within the limitations.