Tired of welcoming our Google overlords? Have a free Gmail account, and just lose your contact sync via Exchange? Well, why not put your contacts over on iCloud for easy synchronization across all your Apple products? Makes sense to me.
Here’s how to do it.
Launch your favorite web browser, whether that’s Safari or Chrome or Firefox, and head to your Gmail contacts. Click on the More button above your contacts list, and then choose Export. Click on The Group and then choose a group of contacts you’d like to export. You can also just export All Contacts, or Select a bunch of contacts before you hit the More button.
However you choose to do it, click on the vCard format down below and then hit the blue Export button. You’ll get a .vcf file download, and it will go wherever your downloaded files go.
Next, head on over to iCloud.com and login with your iTunes account. Click on the Contacts icon, and then click that little gear icon in the lower left of your Contacts page. Choose Import vCard from the menu that pops up, navigate to the .vcf file you saved from above, and click the Open button. Boom–just like that, your contacts from Google will go to iCloud.
On your iOS device, tap the Settings app icon to launch it, then tap on Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Click on the iCloud account there, and make sure that the Contacts toggle is set to ON.
Now you can have a Google-free contacts experience, if that’s your thing.