Sharing your phone number will get much easier with iOS 17

NameDrop
(Image credit: Apple)

We've all been there. You want to give someone your phone number but you either have to take their phone and enter it somewhere or you have to dictate it to them. It's cumbersome. But Apple's fixing all of that with one new feature.

That new feature was announced as part of the WWDC 2023 event on June 5 and it's set to make it way easier to share phone numbers with other iPhone users. And it'll even work with the Apple Watch, too.

The feature, dubbed NameDrop, will ship as part of iOS 17 and watchOS 10 later this year.

AirDrop for names and numbers

Apple's NameDrop feature is an extension of AirDrop and will work simply by bringing two iPhones, or an iPhone and an Apple Watch, close together.

"AirDrop makes it easy to share a file with a colleague or send photos to a friend in seconds, and with iOS 17, AirDrop gets new ways to share," Apple says via a press release confirming tentpole iOS 17 features. "NameDrop allows users to easily share contact information by simply bringing their iPhones together, or by bringing an iPhone and Apple Watch together."

The feature is just one of many quality-of-life changes coming to the iPhone when iOS 17 arrives, likely in or around September. New additions like interactive widgets and improvements to autocorrect will also be added to the mix.

The iOS 17 update is now available in developer bet with a public beta program likely to come online within weeks. Apple also announced iPadOS 17, macOS 14 Sonoma, tvOS 17, and watchOS 10 with all of those updates also going through their own beta program ahead of a fall release window.

The iOS 17 update will also be what powers Apple's best iPhone yet, the iPhone 15 lineup, when it goes on sale in September — assuming Apple follows its own release cadence of course.

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.