iCloud contacts not showing up on phone

Question

I have an iPhone 5C on iOS 9.1. I previously had all of my stuff in the Google world - GMail (using Google Apps), calendar, and contacts. I recently killed the GMail application on the phone, and removed the account from Mail/Contacts/Calendars on the phone.

I exported my contacts from GMail as vCard, and imported them into the icloud.com contacts section on a desktop web browser, and they're showing up fine there. But they're not finding their way into the phone's contacts.

Under the iCloud settings, I do have Contacts selected - I've also tried unchecking and rechecking, and rebooting the phone, and it's been a couple hours, so I don't think it's a matter of being patient.

Any thoughts on what I could be missing, or ways to manually synch contacts?

(I did see this question, which also mentioned looking for a "All iCloud" group, but that group doesn't exist in my contacts - my Groups are totally empty.)

Answer 1

Not sure why it would be like this, but once I selected Mail in the iCloud list, the contacts showed up - you shouldn't need to synch mail in order to synch contacts, but it's not hurting anything since I'm not actually using Apple email, so I'd call that an acceptable workaround.