Free to use · No account · 7-day Pro trial
ChronoContacts reads your phone’s address book and shows it as a timeline, newest first. Find the person you met last Tuesday without remembering how to spell their surname.
iOS and Android. Free to use, no account.
The problem
You met someone at a meetup in March. You typed their name into your phone while they were standing in front of you. Two months later you need them, and all you’ve got is “it was a Tuesday” and “she does something with payments.”
Your address book hands you 800 names sorted by a letter you can’t recall. You scroll. You give up. You message someone else to ask who that was.
You don’t remember people alphabetically. You remember them in order.
What it does
Contacts appear newest first, grouped by month. Scroll back through your year: the client from June, the three people from that conference in April, your landlord from the week you moved. Twelve ways to sort when you want it another way.
A name, a number, an email, a company, a tag. Half a surname works. So does the area code.
Label people “recruiter”, “climbing gym”, “wedding”. Tags live in ChronoContacts and never touch your address book. Notes do go to the contact, same as any other contacts app.
Add someone in the app and it can note where you were, down to the neighbourhood: “Shoreditch, London”. Say no to the location prompt and contacts save without it.
A year to the day after you met someone, your phone says so. Reason enough to get back in touch.
Worth knowing
Your phone doesn’t keep a reliable record of when you added someone. iPhones sometimes do, and ChronoContacts uses those dates where they exist. Everything else is dated from the day the app first sees it.
So your back catalogue starts flat. The timeline sharpens from your first week on.
Privacy
Pricing
Browsing, searching and editing your contacts costs nothing, with no account and no time limit. Pro adds the parts that help you remember people. Try it for 7 days first.
No account, no card
£3.99 a month, or £24.99 a year. Free for 7 days.
The yearly price saves you £22.89 against paying monthly. Billing runs through the App Store and Google Play, so we never see your card, and you cancel in your store settings. Nothing is deleted when the trial ends: your contacts, dates, tags and places stay exactly where they are.
Questions
Only when you save something. Adding, editing or deleting a contact writes to your address book like any contacts app, and notes save to the contact itself.
Tags, dates, places and reminders stay in the app.
Some of them will. See About the dates.
Not with us. Pro is bought through the App Store or Google Play, so it uses the store account you already have.
Browsing, search and sorting do. Two things need a connection: turning a location into a place name, and checking your subscription with the store.
Tags, the extra sort views, reminders and custom themes switch off. Nothing is deleted, and the app keeps working: browsing, search, editing your contacts and the four standard sort views are all free.
Yes. Your contacts are backed up the way your phone already backs them up, through iCloud or Google. The app’s own database sits in its normal app storage, so it is covered by your device backup too and comes back when you restore a phone.
Get the app
Install it now and everyone you meet from here is dated.