Import Features

Importing Mac and Apple Contacts

How to bring the contacts from your Mac's Contacts app, or your iPhone's address book, into Dex — with two-way contact sync, from the mobile app, or from a file.

Your Mac's Contacts app (and the matching address book on your iPhone and iPad) can be brought into Dex. The route to pick depends on whether you want the two lists to stay connected or just to copy what you have in once.

How do I import my Mac Contacts into Dex?

The recommended way is two-way contact sync. Dex runs a CardDAV server, you add it to the Contacts app as an account, and your contacts move between Dex and your Mac in both directions from then on. Nothing needs converting and nothing needs re-importing later.

Go to Settings → Workflow → Sync & Import/Export in Dex on the web, find Two-way contact sync and click Setup. The dialog shows your sync credentials and the step-by-step setup for Mac, iPhone, Android and Outlook.

When you add the account on macOS or iOS, pick CardDAV, not CalDAV. The two sit next to each other under "Add Other Account", and CalDAV is for calendars — it will reject your Dex sync credentials, which looks like a wrong username or password rather than the wrong account type.

Two things worth knowing before you start:

Dex is added as its own account in Contacts, alongside iCloud rather than replacing it. Contacts that live only in iCloud are not pulled into Dex by adding the account — see below for those.
The sync carries the fields an address book understands (names, emails, phone numbers, company and job title, addresses, birthdays, photos). Priority tiers, custom fields, groups, tags, keep-in-touch cadences and notes stay in Dex. The two-way sync page has the full list.

Can I upload a .vcf or vCard file?

No. Dex's file import reads CSV only — there is no option to upload a .vcf, a vCard, or a Mac Contacts .abbu archive. The one exception is a single contact: in the Dex mobile app you can share a contact card from your phone's Contacts app straight into Dex. See Share into Dex. That works one person at a time, not for a whole address book export.

So if Contacts has handed you a .vcf export, you have three options:

Use two-way contact sync instead (above). This is the one that needs no file and no conversion, and it is why we recommend it for Mac and iPhone address books.
Import from your phone. If the same contacts are on your iPhone, open the Dex mobile app and use Import contacts — see Importing Phone Contacts. This is also the workaround for an .abbu archive: put the address book on your iPhone and import it from the app.
Convert the file to CSV. Dex reads a UTF-8 CSV, so a .vcf has to be converted before it can be imported. Once you have the CSV, follow Importing from a CSV — save it as CSV UTF-8 so accented names aren't garbled, and Dex will map the column headers for you.

Only contacts already in iCloud need any of this. Once two-way contact sync is set up, new contacts you add on your Mac or iPhone reach Dex on their own, as long as the Dex account is the default for new contacts in your Contacts settings.

Does Dex sync with iCloud or Google Contacts?

Not directly, and this catches people out. Two-way contact sync connects Dex and your device's own address book. iCloud and Google Contacts are separate accounts on the same device, and Dex never writes into them, so an edit you make in Dex does not appear in iCloud.

If you connect a Google account, Dex reads your Google contacts but never writes back. For the detail on what that means for duplicates and for Merge & Fix, see Two-Way Contact Sync.

Importing from Google Calendar

Effortlessly import contacts from your Google Calendar, including everyone you've sent or received calendar invites from.

Share into Dex

Add people to Dex from any app on your phone — no copying, no typing.