Transfer gmail contacts to iCloud
Need to transfer gmail contacts to iCloud on apple phone
iPhone X, iOS 16
Per shoeluvr13's suggestion, exporting from Gmail to vCard and then importing to iCloud is the easiest way and may work depending on the complexity of your contacts on Gmail. I will warn you that you will likely lose contact data during this process. It's an unfortunate fact that the database structures that are used by nearly every major email provider seem to handle contact attributes differently. As a result, even when exported as an standard such as vCard, certain attributes are often lost during the export/import process. An example of this is when you have multiple email addresses or phone numbers for a contact. Whereas iCloud may have work, other, iphone, home for email types, Gmail or Outlook may use different types such as business, company, email, or allow multiple "email" or "other" entries for a contact. When there are differences in the database schema of different providers, data loss will occur when exporting and then importing into another service like iCloud.
Therefore, although using vCard is likely your best bet for an initial migration of contacts, you will need to then go through nearly every contact once imported into iCloud and manually fix data issues or add back lost information. To do this, you will want to also export from Gmail as .CSV format. You can open a CSV file in many applications such as Excel or Numbers to have a data reference table that includes all of the original contact attributes as they were in Gmail.
How much data loss occurs really depends on the complexity of your contacts. Contacts with multiple email addresses and phone numbers are the ones that will likely have issues. Good luck.
