How to remove duplicate LISTS in Contacts app on iPhone / iCloud / Mac OS

my Contacts has 100's (maybe 1000's) of duplicate LISTS (not Contacts)

looking for a way to batch delete or merge LISTS

(I can remove them one at at a time - but, with the extremely high number of duplicates it can take hours to delete them one at a time - with multiple lists having duplicates it would probably take several days to remove all of the duplicates doing them one at a time)

in Contacts on Mac OS the extremely high number of duplicate Lists makes the app freeze and crash (does not seem to have any affect to performance of Contacts on iPhone)

Posted on Sep 16, 2026 2:44 PM

1 reply

Thomas Didrel

Level 1 (15 points)

Sep 28, 2026 4:01 AM in response to zen_dog

I have the same problem, I tried many things over the years I found in these forums (I've had this problem for a long time…) and nothing worked unfortunately. Like you I have thousands of duplicates. I even tried to delete a bunch of them manually and it looks like they are just coming back over and over. The list of lists just grows :(