Contact card for a couple: is there a secret to know which member of the couple just sent the text?

[elasticmedia]

Frustrating for years: you have many friends who live at single address and it is useful to have the same contact have multiple phone numbers from which text messages can be sent. It is smart to have a single contact with a single address with likely other shared characteristics. The classic example is you have a contact card for John Doe. On the same contact card you note that John Doe has a wife, Jane Smith. Unfortunately when John or Jane sends a message to your iPhone, iMessage says it's coming from John, regardless of which person sends the text. Not only that, when you click on the name of the person who sent the text, it will list all the phone numbers but it doesn't list who those numbers correspond to. Really you have to go to the contact card, look up the numbers and figure out which person has which number, and then go from there. It could easily be fixed by Apple, but somehow they haven't bothered to address this. Apple could include the name associated with the listed numbers very easily. My gut is that I have to do it the hard way: every person needs their own contact card, even if they are married or live together.

 

[chabig]

Yes. One person per contact. You can add a relationship field to each to keep track of who is related to whom.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

I agree with you @elasticmedia that contacts could be done "Better." I do keep separate contacts for each person (because, you know... that's how it's meant to work) but it's frustrating that when John Smith moves, for example, I have to remember to update Jane Smith's home address too. Years ago (like, last century years ago) you could combine people because they had the same phone number (a land line) and the same email (for the whole household). That's not common in recent years so you're best splitting everyone apart.

To an extent this is limited by the CardDAV protocol but Apple could certainly fix this within iCloud contacts, by allowing contacts to be "Linked" for things like home address (and, of course, relationship). If you edit John Smith's contact card to say that "Jane Smith" is his wife, then her contact should automatically identify John as husband - and editing the home address of one should automatically edit the other.

Of course the "Law of Unintended Consequences" always has a vote so it's not a trivial change.

 

[chown33]

To an extent this is limited by the CardDAV protocol but Apple could certainly fix this within iCloud contacts, by allowing contacts to be "Linked" for things like home address (and, of course, relationship). If you edit John Smith's contact card to say that "Jane Smith" is his wife, then her contact should automatically identify John as husband - and editing the home address of one should automatically edit the other.

In Contacts on iPadOS 16.6.1, I can edit a card and scroll all the way to the bottom of the list of available fields. There I see a "link contacts..." field with a (+) next to it, where I can link contacts together.

After I link 2 contacts together, the fields in one contact will appear in the other. Example: I see the email addrs of both contacts in the 1st contact's list of email addrs.

I also see a "Linked Contacts" entry in the 1st contact that takes me to the 2nd contact when I click it.

My guess is that you'd put the Street Address field in only 1 contact, then link the 2 together to indicate they reside at the same place.

EDIT

Here's Apple's info on Contacts for iPhone or iPad:

Manage and delete contacts on your iPhone or iPad - Apple Support

Learn how to set up and manage your contacts to change what shows up in the Contacts app, delete contacts, and more.

support.apple.com

Near the bottom of that page it discusses deleting contacts. In the screenshot, you can see a "link contacts..." field, so it appears iOS Contacts has this feature.

You should probably do some testing to make sure linked contacts work the way you want. Searching for ios linked contacts showed an Apple Community thread from 2012 that mentions some possibly unwanted effects:

what are linked contacts and how do I lin… - Apple Community

discussions.apple.com

 

[FreakinEurekan]

In Contacts on iPadOS 16.6.1, I can edit a card and scroll all the way to the bottom of the list of available fields. There I see a "link contacts..." field with a (+) next to it, where I can link contacts together.

That's a different feature - if you have contacts on two different services (say, iCloud and Google) that function "Links" the same person on iCloud to the same person on Google. But it doesn't address the OP's core issue.