Learn how to create contact groups directly on your iPhone or iPad to manage your contacts better and easily send group texts and emails.
We recently published a post explaining how to create contact groups on Mac, so we thought it would be a good idea to show you how to do that directly from your iPhone or iPad as well. Creating, editing, and managing contact groups on iPhone is a fairly simple process, thanks to an application we created aptly called Contact Groups.
There are many applications in the App Store that let you create groups of contacts on iPhone and iPad, but we weren’t entirely satisfied with any of them, so we decided to build Contact Groups, which we believe is the best out there as it is free, simple and offers an elegant design.
Create contact groups on iPhone or iPad
1) Open the Contact Groups app and grant it access to your contacts (only required the first time you launch the application).
2) Tap the plus icon (+) from the upper right corner, which should take you to the New Group screen.
3) Type in a group name. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will call this group “Friends,” but you’re obviously free to name it whatever you want.
4) After that, tap Add contacts.
5) Scroll through your contacts list and select all the ones you want to add to your group. Tap the Save button to finish creating your new contact group.
6) Preview the newly created group and tap the Save button again to confirm.
You can obviously start this process over should you want to create multiple groups.
When you need to send a group text or email, just tap the group you created in the Contact Groups app and tap the Message or Mail button, followed by Write Message.
Remove contacts from a group
Note that removing a contact from a group does not delete this contact from your address book.
1) Go back to the main screen of the Contact Groups app. Tap a group from which you want to remove one or several contacts. This will show you all the contacts that you have assigned to this group.
2) Tap the Edit button in the upper right corner of the screen and unselect the contacts you want to remove from this group.
3) Finally, tap the Save button in the upper right to save your edited group.
Delete a contacts group on iPhone
Deleting a group of contacts will not remove the individual contacts from your iPhone Contacts app.
1) Open the Contact Groups app, and you will see your created contacts in the Groups section.
2) Swipe left on one of the groups and hit Delete.
Use the built-in Contacts app
In addition to the above method, you can also open the Apple Contacts app or go to Phone > Contacts and tap Lists from the top left corner. Now, tap Add List to create a list and add contacts to it. One downside to this approach is that you cannot use the group created here to start a group messages chat. However, you can tap a group and hit the Mail icon to send a group email.
On a related note: