Alex Vasylenko

To share a contact on iPhone, open the Contacts app, tap the card you want to send (My Card at the top is your own), tap Share Contact, choose the fields to include, then pick Messages, Mail or AirDrop from the share sheet. The other person receives a .vcf file and taps it to save the contact. To share your own card with someone standing next to you, hold the top of your iPhone a few centimeters from the top of their iPhone until NameDrop appears on both screens, then choose whether to share your card and receive theirs or only receive. The “Share your name and photo?” prompt in Messages is a third, separate feature: Name & Photo Sharing sends your name, photo and Contact Poster to the people you message, not your contact card. None of the tap-based routes reach an Android phone; a message with the .vcf attached does.

Those are three different features that iPhone owners describe with the same words, and the right button depends on which one you mean. This guide separates them, walks through each with the labels from Apple's iOS 27 iPhone User Guide, and then covers what Apple's own pages leave out: what actually lands on the other phone, who can see your card, how to switch each kind of sharing off, and what to do when the other phone is an Android.

The best business card scanner app in 2026 depends on where you want the contact to end up. For a card a month you do not need an app: Google Lens and the iPhone camera's Live Text save a phone number or email from a card into your contacts for free. For a stack of cards and a searchable list, Haystack scans without a cap on its free plan, and CamCard gives you 100 scans before it asks for money. If your contacts live in a CRM, the scanner inside HubSpot's or Zoho's own app is free and skips the export step. And if you already carry a digital business card, the scanner built into your card app — DBC, Blinq, HiHello and Popl all have one — keeps the cards you collect next to the card you hand out.

That last part matters more than the OCR. Sales reps spend only 40% of an average workweek selling, and 13% of the week goes to manually entering data, according to Salesforce's State of Sales report (7th edition, February 2026, 4,050 sales professionals). A scanner that reads a card perfectly and then strands the contact in its own app has only moved the typing to a different screen.

Trade show lead capture is how an exhibiting team records the people it meets at a show, and what each of them needs, so sales can follow up. There are two routes: rent the show’s lead retrieval app, which decodes that show’s badges into registration data, or bring your own app, which works at every event but, unless you also pay for the show’s badge API, reads only what a badge prints or a visitor chooses to share. Some universal apps connect to that API, but the access is sold per show and costs more than a license for the show’s app.

On the 2026–27 order forms we checked, a single phone-app license for the show’s app costs $255 to $540 per show, and five reps on the app route pay $815 to $1,200 before tax and fees. Rent when you exhibit once or twice a year or need the full registration record. Bring your own when you exhibit often, meet people away from the booth, or want one workflow at every event. The two routes can also work side by side.

A digital business card for WhatsApp is a card link you can paste into any chat, group, Status, or profile. It opens in the other person’s browser with no app to install, shows your details with a Save Contact button, and carries a WhatsApp button — a wa.me link — that opens a chat with you in one tap. Its QR code covers the conversations that start in person.

That is a lot of reach for one link. WhatsApp has more than 3 billion monthly users worldwide, Mark Zuckerberg said on Meta’s first-quarter 2025 earnings call, as TechCrunch reported — and it is no longer just an overseas habit: the year before, he put the app at more than 100 million monthly active users in the United States, according to TechCrunch. If your clients, suppliers, or prospects message you there, your card should work there.