iPhone Member Tools: Add to contacts

So I did a little looking to see if I was posting something that's been discussed a lot and didn't find anything right off.

I like the add-to-contacts feature in Tools. I like how it brings the photo in as well. My text threads look much better. The problem I have is that if I add a husband and a wife to my contacts, things get messy. Example with made up names: Bob, Amy. Bob's personal phone is his cell and his household phone is Amy's cell in Tools. Amy shows a personal phone and no household phone (presumably because her personal is the household phone). I add Amy to my contacts and she comes in with her personal. I then add Bob to my contacts. Because he comes in with a personal and a household phone that is Amy's, it messes up my text thread with both of them. They both exist as separate contacts in my phone now. But texts from Amy's number on the thread look like they're coming from Bob because of her numbering being his household number. Looks like a I have a thread with 3 people: myself, Bob, and Bob.

Not sure why it defaults to Bob instead of Amy. If I swap the order and add Bob to contacts first and Amy second, problem doesn't happen.

So that's a pain. Just wondering if anyone else seeing this or if someone is looking into fixing this? Seems like a doable approach might be to only bring in the personal phone and not the household info.

jimlaudie wrote: Tue Apr 19, 2022 10:17 am Just wondering if anyone else seeing this or if someone is looking into fixing this? Seems like a doable approach might be to only bring in the personal phone and not the household info.

I see exactly that and it took me a while to figure out that the bishop was not really texting me from his wife's account. So now, when I add a contact from Tools, I immediately edit it so that only one phone number remains in the contact. My (Android) phone is able to keep all of the names straight when I do that.

I doubt anyone is looking into fixing it. It is not a Tools problem. It is the way Contacts handles phone numbers in relation to the text program. Tools will add both phone numbers as it creates a contact if there are two numbers available. I then delete one of them, usually the household number, keeping the personal/cell number.

Another thing I have successfully done is to reverse the order of the phone numbers in a contact. My text program seems to always pull the first number from the Contact and the name attached to that number.

The only fix I can think of is if the program only pulled in the "personal" contact and only used the "household" if the personal was left blank. Or at least gave the option to do that. Anything else would require changing how the church stores phone numbers. That's going to be much harder to convince anyone to do.

I think it's worth giving feedback to the developers. The best way to do that is from within the app.

Thanks to both of you for the feedback. Kind of bugs but I can live with it and do what lajackson says. Would be nice to see this change.

My approach has been to immediately delete the household number when the new contact is displayed.

Regarding my previous post, I was using an Android phone. When I added a contact from Tools, the new contact was immediately displayed in the Contacts app. That made it easy to delete the household number.

I recently started using an iPhone, and I noticed that when I add a new contact I just get a success message. It would be very useful if the iPhone version of Tools would open the new contact like the Android version does.

It would be very useful if the iPhone version of Tools would open the new contact like the Android version does

The correct way to get this request into the Church's system is by using the Feedback functionality, for example clicking the "Feedback" link at the bottom of most church webpages. I agree having this work on the iPhone is a good suggestion, but as this isn't official Church support, posting it here won't register the feedback.

BrianEdwards wrote: Sat Aug 19, 2023 8:19 pm

It would be very useful if the iPhone version of Tools would open the new contact like the Android version does

The correct way to get this request into the Church's system is by using the Feedback functionality, for example clicking the "Feedback" link at the bottom of most church webpages.

Alternatively, the in-app Send Feedback feature will also send the request to the decision makers for consideration.

Just put it in feedback via the webpage approach. Thanks!