Peoplez

I have a hard time keeping my contacts up to date. Most of them are “almost-right” and it’s difficult keeping up with changes or new people I get to know. I don’t want a CRM. I want a single contact system that works across my iPhone, Mac, and iPad — one that knows the difference between my colleague and my neighbor, but doesn’t force me to manage that separation manually.

That system doesn’t exist yet. I’m calling it Peoplez.

What’s wrong with the status quo

Apple’s Contacts app already supports multiple accounts. The idea is: work contacts in Exchange, personal contacts in iCloud. In practice, this creates more problems than it solves:

• Duplicates everywhere — The same person ends up in multiple accounts because you added them in different contexts.
• Wrong defaults — You save a contact and it lands in the wrong account. Now it’s invisible in the wrong context.
• No overlap — Some people are both professional and personal. Accounts force a binary choice.
• Search is fragmented — You can show all accounts at once, but there’s no way to filter by “show me just my work people” without hiding entire accounts.

What Peoplez would do differently

One system, lists instead of accounts

All contacts live in one place. Professional and private aren’t separate accounts — they’re lists. By default, I see everyone. When I want to focus, I filter by list.

• A contact can be on multiple lists: “Work,” “Friends,” “XConf 2026,” “Ski group”
• Lists are user-defined, not dictated by sync infrastructure
• The default view shows all contacts — no hiding, no toggling accounts

Smart capture — conference networking built in

When I’m at a conference and meet someone, I capture them in one of three ways:

Badge photo — Badges are “contact-ish” but not contacts. A badge photo is raw input. Peoplez would extract the name and company (OCR), create a contact draft, and keep the badge photo as provenance (“met at …”).

LinkedIn linking — The fastest “get the identity right” path. LinkedIn positions QR codes as a way to connect with people you meet offline. Peoplez would pick up connections made on LinkedIn and enrich or update the contact - in one action instead of three. Peoplez would look for recently added LinkedIn links and suggest me to add them, with the possibility to add data.

Quick note — Sometimes you don’t want to pull out your phone mid-conversation. You just remember: “Anna — works at X — talked about iOS deployment — follow up in March.” Peoplez would turn that note into a contact (or match it to an existing one) and add the context as structured data, not random text that gets lost.

In all three cases: capture first, organize later. The contact lands in my Contacts, and I decide which lists it belongs to when I’m ready.

What a contact should remember

A useful contact isn’t just a name and a number. For people I meet at events, I want:

• When did I meet them?
• Where did I meet them? (event + city)
• What did we talk about? (topics)
• Where do they work? (company + role)
• When should I follow up?

Both Apple and Google have a notes field on contacts — it’s just underused because nothing fills it automatically. Peoplez would make this the default, not the exception. Peoplez is just a gate / organized pipe into my Contacts - contact’s data is always stored in my Apple Contact App.

Match, dedupe, enrich

When a new contact comes in, Peoplez would:

1. Match — “This looks like Anna Müller already in your contacts — update?”
2. Dedupe — Merge duplicates across what used to be separate accounts
3. Enrich — Pull in company, title, profile link (where permitted), keep the source

Works across all Apple devices

Peoplez stores contact data in Apple’s Contacts that sync across iPhone, Mac, and iPad. Same contacts, same lists, same notes. One system — not three apps with three different sync stories.

The app I want in my stack

Peoplez isn’t a CRM. It’s not a “networking app.” It’s a gate to Apple Contacts: one unified system for all the people in your life, with lists instead of account silos, smart capture for the messy reality of meeting people, and rich context so you actually remember who someone is six months later.

That’s the software I want.