How to Transfer Contacts From Android to iPhone

This article explains three ways to transfer the contacts from your Android address book to iPhone. The information applies to smartphones or tablets with Android 4.0 or higher and iPhones with iOS 9.3 or higher.

Use the Move to iOS App to Transfer Contacts

Apple makes transferring data from Android to iPhone easy with its Move to iOS app for Android devices, which is available in the Google Play store.

This app pulls together all the data on your Android device—contacts, text messages, photos and videos, calendar, email accounts, website bookmarks—and then imports them to your new iPhone over Wi-Fi. The process couldn't be simpler. 

Download the Move to iOS app from Google Play and get started.

While it transfers your data, it doesn't transfer your Android apps. Instead, it makes suggestions from the App Store based on the apps you have on your Android device. Matching free apps are suggested for download during the transfer. Matching paid apps are added to your App Store Wishlist for later purchase.

Use Your SIM Card to Transfer Contacts

If you are only interested in moving your contacts and not your other data, you can use the SIM card in your Android phone. Since you can store address book data on an Android SIM card, you can back up your contacts there and move them to your iPhone (the SIM cards need to be the same size in both devices, of course). All iPhones beginning with iPhone 5 use Nano SIMs.

Here's what you need to do:

1. On your Android device, launch your Contacts app, tap on the menu button, and navigate to Settings. Find the Import/Export setting and tap it.

   The following images show the steps on a Samsung device running Android Oreo. Your screens may look a little different, depending on the device you own, but the basic steps should be roughly the same.

2. Tap the Export button. Then choose to export to the SIM card.

3. Wait for the contacts to be exported to your SIM card.

4. When the export is complete, remove the SIM card from your Android phone and insert it into your iPhone.

5. On the iPhone, tap the Settings app to open it.

6. Tap Contacts (on some older versions of the iOS, this is Mail, Contacts, Calendars).

7. Tap Import SIM Contacts.

When the import is done, your contacts will be available in the pre-installed Contacts app on your iPhone. 

Use Google to Transfer Contacts

You can use the power of the cloud to move your contacts from Android to iPhone. In this case, using your Google account is the best choice because of both Android and iPhone support for it.

To transfer your contacts, follow these steps:

1. On your Android device, back up your contacts to Google. The backup should happen automatically if you use your Google account on your device. You can also tap Settings > Account, the Google account you want to sync to, and then toggle Sync Contacts to On.

2. With that done, add your Google account to your iPhone.

3. When the account is set up, you may be able to enable contact syncing right away. If not, go to Settings > Passwords & Accounts and tap the Gmail account.

4. Move the Contacts slider to the On (green) position, and the contacts you added to your Google account will sync to the iPhone. 

From now on, any change you make to your iPhone address book syncs to your Google account. You'll have a complete copy of your address book in two places, safely backed up and ready to transfer to other devices as needed.