Duplicate contacts at Whatsapp - what to do?

If your contacts appear twice on Whatsapp, this is due to the synchronization of your contacts with other services. Causes can include iCloud, Outlook, Yahoo or Hotmail.

Duplicate Whatsapp contacts through synchronization

By activating services like iCloud, your phone book can now have two groups: iPhone and iCloud contacts. Whatsapp sees the contacts in both groups twice, as apps cannot distinguish between the groups. To prevent your contacts from appearing twice in Whatsapp, follow these steps:

• Open the Contacts app and click on the "Groups" button in the top left.
• If you see two or more groups there, you must now choose one. It's best to delete the contacts on your phone and leave the iCloud contacts.
• Either you delete each contact individually by hand, or you go to icloud.com and delete an entire list there.
• If the contacts in your address book are now only available once, they will only be displayed once in Whatsapp.

Radical solution: disable synchronization of contacts

If you don't want to spend long deleting the duplicate contacts, you can simply switch off the synchronization of the contacts with iCloud. However, only do this if you don't necessarily need your contacts in the iCloud and it is sufficient for them to be on your iPhone.

1. Open the "Settings" app.
2. Scroll down in the menu and select "iCloud".
3. Deactivate the "Contacts" item (see picture).
4. Finally, click on the red button "Delete from iPhone". You now only have the contacts that are saved on your device. The additional data stored in the iCloud was deleted.

Before you follow either of the two steps, you should first make a backup so that no contact is accidentally deleted forever.