Other With eSIM enabled (dual SIM setup), how to manage contacts?

[Synomenon]

So it looks like Apple added dual SIM functionality on these 2018 iPhones, BUT forgot to update the Contacts app. to work with a dual SIM setup.



Anyone know of a way to "separate" contacts one would use with each line other than having them all in contacts and assigned either the primary line or secondary line for calling?

 

[cwosigns]

Why would you need two separate contacts apps?

 

[Synomenon]

Why would you need two separate contacts apps?

To separate work contacts from personal contacts...

 

[KeepCalmPeople]

Given that you still can’t change which group a contact is in without using a Mac or icloud.com, I’d expect Apple to provide a solution to this in iOS 14.

 

[OBirder]

Given that you still can’t change which group a contact is in without using a Mac or icloud.com, I’d expect Apple to provide a solution to this in iOS 14.

It seems that you are quite optimistic.

 

[Tom2D2]

You can set contacts to "always use" one phone number or the other in the dual sim setup.

I don't know of a way to completely separate the contacts list, but then again, I really don't see where it is necessary. Just search your contacts for the name of the individual or company.

 

[jiska78]

This functionality is still not possible. How ridiculous.

I can't believe that after upgrading to an iPhone 12, I have to go through 280 contacts one by one and set the preferred line to business.

 

[jmsnyc]

This functionality is still not possible. How ridiculous.

I can't believe that after upgrading to an iPhone 12, I have to go through 280 contacts one by one and set the preferred line to business.

I agree with you 100%. I dont expect in IOS 15 either

 

[Drs247]

This functionality is still not possible. How ridiculous.

I can't believe that after upgrading to an iPhone 12, I have to go through 280 contacts one by one and set the preferred line to business.

Feel the pain. Just activated dual sim n was surprised to find out that it’s not possible to assign a default contact number per contact list.
So yes, gotta do it 1 at a time. Apple really needs to re think their contact management/contacts app.

 

[Hildy]

Even worse it isn't intelligent enough to associate international numbers with their respective esim or sim. So I have a sim for the UAE and one for North America but the contacts are all confused regarding which line should be used to contact each various set of contacts. It is easy to make a smart list in macOS by country code so they are grouped, but then assigning an entire group to a line seems missing.

Even worse, I've dealt with various international lines for decades by using my iCloud email for iMessage, but the new sim assignments seem to default iMessages back to a specific line based on the contact preferences even when all new iMessages are meant to be started from my iCloud email address.

What a mess. It would be super handy from the international perspective to auto set the default line to the one with the matching country code. Then to also respect the default iMessage address...

 

[ukms]

Even worse it isn't intelligent enough to associate international numbers with their respective esim or sim. So I have a sim for the UAE and one for North America but the contacts are all confused regarding which line should be used to contact each various set of contacts. It is easy to make a smart list in macOS by country code so they are grouped, but then assigning an entire group to a line seems missing.

Even worse, I've dealt with various international lines for decades by using my iCloud email for iMessage, but the new sim assignments seem to default iMessages back to a specific line based on the contact preferences even when all new iMessages are meant to be started from my iCloud email address.

What a mess. It would be super handy from the international perspective to auto set the default line to the one with the matching country code. Then to also respect the default iMessage address...

Assuming I correctly understand what you are asking for. Your scenario makes sense providing you only use 2 sims. Many use multiple sims and don’t always want the matching sim for the call.

Example if I’m home in the UAE, I use a UK esim and a UAE esim. I don’t want all of my UK numbers associated to use the UK sim if I’m in the UAE. When I’m in UAE I want all numbers associated with the UAE SIM regardless of the country code.

There isn’t a perfect one size fits all solution if you use multiple sims.

 

[Hildy]

Assuming I correctly understand what you are asking for. Your scenario makes sense providing you only use 2 sims. Many use multiple sims and don’t always want the matching sim for the call.

Example if I’m home in the UAE, I use a UK esim and a UAE esim. I don’t want all of my UK numbers associated to use the UK sim if I’m in the UAE. When I’m in UAE I want all numbers associated with the UAE SIM regardless of the country code.

There isn’t a perfect one size fits all solution if you use multiple sims.

My recommendation was to allow the use of contacts to group and assign large swaths of contacts/numbers to various lines. There doesn’t seem to be any logical vehicle for batch editing line assignments.

I suspect not having line assignments at all and having logic for your situation to define the active line as an override would be best.

This is what I avoided by using an iCloud email address for all iMessages as it allowed me to transition many sims over many years without the cumbersome business of messages being sent to old phone numbers or simply inactive lines.

Example I would have my North American sim installed when I was there and my UK sim would be inactive. It didn’t matter as much with iMessage because I would always use an email address rather than phone number to begin conversations so it was agnostic of my sim until someone started a thread with me using one of my phone numbers. Now I can use many esims, but will still have issues if iMessage defaults me to starting threads from a phone number, which it was doing although I think they’ve fixed it back to the preset default iMessage contact.

Theoretically there should be some funky logic that defaults your phone and data usage to the sim which is most economically feasible. However I suspect this functionality was originally aimed at Work vs. Home sims with the same country code as the example of multiple lines rather than international use cases.

In the interim allowing the client to edit line designations on a computer would be a very nice use case for people splitting up designations for multiple lines, regardless of international variability or with the same country code.