How to group your contacts by country

If your phone book spans multiple countries, grouping by country is the fastest way to make sense of it. Sales and recruiting teams need it for compliance (different SMS marketing rules per country). Founders need it for outreach prep. Anyone with a multi-country life needs it just to find people.

iOS itself doesn't ship a "group by country" feature. There are two ways to add one.

Why iOS Groups don't solve this

iOS has Groups (in Contacts), and you can technically create a group called "UK" or "Nigeria" and tag contacts manually. This is what most guides recommend. The problem with manual tagging:

• You have to remember to do it every time you add a contact.
• Imported contacts don't get tagged at all.
• It's tedious for any address book larger than a few hundred entries.
• The country has to be added by hand — there's no automatic detection.

If you have 5,000 contacts, manual tagging is a weekend project.

The automatic way: phone-number country code

Every international phone number starts with a country code. +44 is the UK, +1 is the US/Canada, +234 is Nigeria, +33 is France, etc. The full list is the ITU-T E.164 country code allocation.

If your contacts have phone numbers stored in international format (with the leading + and country code), parsing that prefix tells you the country. No manual tagging required.

Two complications:

• Some contacts are stored as local numbers. A US contact might be saved as 415-555-2671 with no country code. To bin them correctly, you have to know the default country (usually inferred from the SIM card or device locale).
• Country codes overlap. +1 covers the US, Canada, and a dozen Caribbean countries — distinguishing them requires looking at the area code (NPA) too.

How Pluck does it

Pluck handles the grouping automatically using libphonenumber (Google's open-source phone-number library, the same one Android uses) via the phone_numbers_parser package for Dart:

1. On import, every phone number is parsed.
2. Numbers in international format are matched to their country directly.
3. Numbers in local format are matched against the default country (read from your SIM, or your device locale if SIM info isn't available on iOS 16.4+).
4. The country code's NPA is used to disambiguate +1 numbers between US/Canada/Caribbean.
5. The result: each contact is assigned to one or more countries (a contact with two phone numbers in different countries appears in both groups).

The countries appear as a sorted list in the Organize screen, each with the country's flag, calling code, and contact count. You can toggle countries on or off, search across all of them, and export each country to its own file or all together.

What you can do with grouped contacts

• Country-specific SMS campaigns. Different countries have different opt-in laws. TCPA in the US, GDPR + ePrivacy in the EU, PIPEDA in Canada. Pulling a clean per-country list lets you respect each.
• Per-country pricing or product lists. If you sell something with regional pricing, segmenting outreach by country saves emails.
• Time-zone-aware messaging. Country implies time zone (mostly). Useful for picking when to send.
• Cleanup. "I have 12 contacts in Switzerland and I haven't been there in 8 years" is a useful prompt.

Edge cases

A few that come up:

• Contacts with no phone number. Email-only contacts can't be country-grouped. Pluck treats them as "Unknown".
• Contacts with multiple numbers in different countries. They appear in each country's group, with the contact count incremented in both.
• Numbers stored in unusual formats. A number like 00442077946000 (with double-zero international prefix instead of +) is parsed correctly. A number like 020 7794 6000 with no country code defaults to the SIM/locale country, which is right most of the time.