Incidents 1 & 2, ~June 2025: Missing contacts & then contacts duplication.
My father in law purchased a new iPhone, so I inquired about using his old phone (an iPhone 14 Pro) as a testing device.
He said absolutely, but that he was keeping it around “because it has some recent contacts that did not sync to the new phone” he said that the missing contacts were from the past several months. He was keeping his old phone in his vehicle so that he could look them up on said phone.
So I stepped in to help, or so I thought.
My first instinct was to, before doing anything: back up his existing contacts. Apple makes it very easy to export a device’s contacts in a big file: so I did, to his iPad over AirDrop, thinking they could sit in the Files app (he is mainly just an iPhone+iPad guy, so where else would I put them?).
So the big file showed on the iPad in the Airdrop UI. Merely accepting the file over AirDrop (without any warning whatsoever (the button did not say what was about to happen, just something innocuous like “Save file”)) IMMEDIATELY added all of the contacts from this file into his !@#$ing contacts and they began syncing! It was actually worse: there WAS a button in the bottom of the modal that said “Save and Add to contacts” — I did NOT click that button, I clicked the other one that did not say add to contacts.
There was no communication that this would happen let alone any detection that ALL were already in his contacts list. Insane footgun to have in your software, so now there’s a massive second problem. Neither of his issues have been unresolved, he just lives with it.
Incidents 3, 4, 5, August 2026: Missing contacts, shadow contacts, contacts duplication, slop UX.
Out of nowhere, my wife (a normal Apple user with normal settings enabled, who has been on the same iPhone 13 Pro since 2023) said that contacts from the past 18 months or so had gone missing.
Sort of.
They are missing in that she can not type in her contacts to find them, but shadows of them remain, like, when she starts typing the missing contact’s name in the new iMessage field, she can see that contact’s name field appear, but when she clicks them, it starts a new message and only shows that person’s number.
Like her dad’s situation, there is seemingly no recourse. It’s just a data destruction bug there’s no coming back from.
Next, I’ll finish with some slop UX issues:
She is coordinating a baby shower for a friend.
That friend sends her a collection of contacts over an imessage.
When my wife taps “Add all” there is zero UI feedback that anything has happened or succeeded. So she taps again and again. Now she has several copies of all these contacts. Should she have manually checked after tapping “Add all” the first time? Well, knowing how terrible Apple software has been lately, I guess. But an average user should not have to do that, obviously. This is a baby version of the same issue I encountered with her dad: the UI should not add duplicate contacts, it should error out! AH!
To finish it out: in the collection of shared baby-shower-related contacts was a person named, let’s say, “Michelle Smith”. Apple’s trash software inexplicably insisted on trying to merge “Michelle Smith” with a preexisting contact “Michelle Doe”.
Author’s note: I’ve been focusing entirely on my startup, so if this post seems lower effort: it is. This particular topic (Apple’s contacts) has racked up too many recent and high-stakes offenses to ignore, so I had to write something.
Again, sorry I don’t have screenshots of these, I’m short on time, but what in the everliving hell is happening at Apple these days? What explains the sorry state of code review?