Question regarding wiping iPhone and contacts...

[Random Gecko]

Yesterday I got my smashed iPhone screen repaired at the Apple Store and they ran some diagnostics on it as I complained about the battery life. They told me that I had 24 crashing apps, and a few other discrepancies. I've basically always restored my iPhones from a backup so I'm now about 5 phones deep in restored iOS installs, and I'm guessing it's causing my battery issues. The Apple genius said as much, and if I restored my iPhone to factory, I'd see a big improvement as the battery's condition was very good.

My question is regarding contacts. I don't have a problem re-installing apps, or starting with zero pictures etc again (they'll be backed up on my Mac) but I really can't be bothered to enter each contact manually.

Is there any way of getting my contacts over without it bringing back any of these supposed problems that are causing less than satisfactory battery life?

 

[charlyham]

Can you sync them to your iCloud account?

 

[eyoungren]

I got my first iPhone on launch day 2012 for the iPhone 5. I went ahead and used iCloud for contacts until I discovered that (at that time) they were unalterable outside of the phone, particularly when trying to get everything linked up with my PowerPC Macs.

As I had a long standing Google account then I decided to use that for contacts and it's worked for me on every device I've used. I can edit them on my iPhone, my Intel Mac, my PowerPC Macs, my Android tablet and the Mac at work as well as any other iDevice I have hooked up to it.

But my initial problem was getting all those iCloud contacts over to Google. Turns out that was easy.

If you login to icloud.com and access your Contacts you can export those contacts in a format that Google can use. Just export from icloud.com and then use Google to import the contacts. Then, delete the contacts off your phone and when that is done just add your Google account for Contacts and specify that it's that account the phone is to use for contacts.

With the Intel Macs and later versions of OS X you can also hook them up to the Google account and freely edit no matter what device you use.

Now, I specify Google, but if you have a Yahoo account or some other sort of account that will do Contacts it's the same process. Just use whatever you're comfortable with. I just happen to prefer Google over Yahoo or anything else.

 

[Random Gecko]

Can you sync them to your iCloud account?

Yeah I have done. That won't bring anything weird over?

 

[Serelus]

Yeah I have done. That won't bring anything weird over?

Nope that should work just fine. Been doing it that way for years. You can even log on to iCloud.com to make sure all of your contacts are there. And then wipe the phone accordingly.

 

[Pharmscott]

They told me that I had 24 crashing apps, and a few other discrepancies. I've basically always restored my iPhones from a backup so I'm now about 5 phones deep in restored iOS installs, and I'm guessing it's causing my battery issues. The Apple genius said as much, and if I restored my iPhone to factory, I'd see a big improvement as the battery's condition was very good.

Did they happen to say (or does anyone know) why simply closing all apps and rebooting the phone doesn't fix this? I can see some junk files being collected by repeatedly restoring to new phones and thus reduced storage. But permanently crashing apps doesn't make sense to me.