Conquer Your Contacts with Cardhop – How to Cleverly Add, Edit, and Manage the Contacts on your iPhone or iPad

Today’s app is Cardhop from Flexibits, the same company that develops the fantastic Fantastical calendar app / service.

Fantastical is a superb app that let’s you type in a date or appointment in “natural language” and the app parses it all out into a bona fide calendar appointment.

Cardhop brings that same “natural language” capability to your contacts!

Now I’m going to anticipate that the first question that comes to mind, and the same thing that I thought as well … why would I use another app for contacts when it’s already built into the phone?

That’s an excellent question, and I’m going to show you the best features of Cardhop so you can make your own decision , but the brilliant thing is that you DON’T have to use a separate app! Because Cardhop works with the contacts you already have in iCloud or on your phone, and your contacts sync back and forth!

In fact, when you first launch Cardhop, you have to give it permission to access your contacts, and it will dutifully pull everything into the app.

All of your contacts will be available by tapping the circle button in the middle. There is also a Favorites button, a clock icon for “Recents,” a little present icon for your contact’s Birthdays, and then Settings.

One of the most prevalent features you’ll see on every screen in Cardhop is the search bar … but this is more than just a search bar, Cardhop calls it a “Parser” because it actively parses the information you type into the box.

For example, you can use the Parser to add information to an already existing contact, or add a birthday to a contact, or even take action on a contact such as “Call Gunther.”

I find the Parser is most helpful for adding a new contact. In the default iOS Contacts app, you have to tap into individual fields to fill out the information but that takes a lot of time. In Cardhop, you can just type a name, and then just keep typing their email address, phone number, etc. and Cardhop “parses” all the information in your contacts. When you’re done, just tap “Add Contact.”

On the flipside, when you want to share YOUR contact information, Cardhop offers a fantastic feature they call “Business Card” but I like to think of it more generally as “Contact Cards.” When you tap the little business card icon, the screen shows your “business card” that you can customize with information you want to show someone. Plus it has automatically generates a QR code that someone can just scan to quickly add your information to their phone. Plus you can have multiple “business cards” so you can have one for your professional information and one for your personal information.

Cardhop also lets you quickly call or Facetime someone, or other actions, without having to painstakingly navigate through your Contacts. You can customize the “Quick Actions” that show for each contact.

One of my favorite features of Cardhop is how easy it is to add notes. When I meet someone, I like to mention the date when I met them or jot something down to remember the meeting. I like to note the date and time that I compose the note, and Cardhop has a brilliant little “Add Timestamp” button that does it for me so quickly!

Are all of these features enough to part with $5 when you already have a contacts app that works just fine? Obviously, it’s ultimately up to you and maybe how much you rely on your contacts to follow folks. But any changes I make to a contact in Cardhop gets synced back to the “main” contacts, so I use BOTH apps, and find myself truly going to Cardhop first just because it’s so easy to use, and offers a variety of other features!