Today i will show you how to import Gmail Contacts to iPhone 5 running iOS 8. It might sound easy but it isn’t, see below.
After losing my Android handset, it was time to use an iPhone 5 i had sitting in my drawer. Everything is fine, it is a brilliant handset despite the battery’s short life, but somehow i had to import my Gmail Contacts.
All my contacts are in my Gmail account and for a strange reason i was expecting this to be tricky. Unlike Androids where you can import Contacts through a file, iPhone doesn’t even have an option for such an import. In addition, there was nothing indicating how to do this task in the phone menu. So for a total iPhone-newbie like me this wasn’t easy, or at least not the obvious.
Setting up a Google Account
Since there was no option to import Gmail Contacts to iPhone 5, i tried Google Search. Everywhere i looked there was a standard guide to create an account and the Contacts would be added but no luck. The newly-added account couldn’t be verified because of Google’s 2-step verification process. No matter how long i waited for a popup to enter the verification code, nothing happened. So going back to Google Search to find out how to trigger it.
Google 2-step-verification bypass
Luckily, I found this article on how to generate app passwords for Google applications. Each application can use its own password per device. I generated a password for Google account and used it instead of my actual password. This small project was coming to an end.
But no, it was a dead end. Although everything was ok and the account was verified, the Contacts on my iPhone where still empty. Although it was mentioned in Apple Support that Contacts would sync automatically, i had no result.
Import Gmail Contacts to iPhone 5 – The Success Story
As i was becoming desperate and nervous of my bad luck, there was the brainstorm. I simply rebooted the handset and all of a sudden everything was there. Just that, a simple reboot.
The Drawback
When i finally managed to setup the account, i made the mistake to turn on mail sync. As a result Apple took a revenge and marked all my mail as unread. I ended up with an inbox full of unread mail, but managed to import Gmail Contacts to iPhone 5.
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