My wife recently came to me with a simple problem – when she tried to update certain contact details on her iPhone, they would disappear and not save. I verified this issue by adding a birthday to someone’s name. As soon as the contacts window was closed and reopened, the birthday was gone. Even a simple change such as changing the number type from ‘mobile’ to ‘iPhone’ wouldn’t stick, reverting back to ‘mobile’.
A quick look at her settings revealed her contacts was synced to Gmail, which I assumed was the culprit. However, a cursory search didn’t come up with much as most others had synchronization issues. I had to dig pretty deep, but I did discover someone having a similar issue – Birthdays wouldn’t save unless the year was included. Sure enough, my wife wasn’t putting the year in for birthdays. I tested this by adding a birthday year in with a contact of hers. It saved. Ah ha. It turns out, Gmail can only save certain details in certain formats. This differs from iCloud, which allows phone number types such as ‘iPhone’ to be saved, along side year less birthdays.
The fix was easy enough – we moved her from using Gmail as her contacts sync to iCloud. Now she can change the little details and add birthdays to contacts whom she knows the days, but not the years they were born.
Misc. details about this specific post:
iPhone 8
iOS 12.0
Issue date: Oct. 6th, 2018