A question on Dialer and Contacts options, duplicate issue and app preferences - OpenOS

Hi,

I use the stock dialer and have done since I got my FP2 in Oct 18; I’ve also used the stock contacts but for some reason it always creates duplicates of most of my contacts (it seems to dupe phone contacts and WhatsApp when a contact has both) - merging doesn’t recognise the contacts as being the same, de-duping works for a day then they all come back

I downloaded Simple Contacts and that sorted out the dupe issues but whenever I use the standard dialer it defaults to the stock contacts. I have tried other dialers but they default to stock contacts too.

I cannot see anywhere in settings etc. where I can point the dialer to Simple Contacts or even a dialer anywhere (free for Open OS of course) that lets me either.

Any help/advice/guidance etc. fully welcomed as always.

Thanks

s

I had the duped contact issue at some point; I ended up linking all the dupes through the standard Contacts interface, so they correctly display as a single contact. Long-tap one contact, tap the duplicate, tap three dot menu, tap ‘link’ and confirm.

Not really a good solution if you have a lot of contacts of course, but I’ve found no other way of doing it and haven’t had the problem since.

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Thx, have done that in the past and it took forever then the same issue came back and I can’t bring myself to do it all over again! :grimacing:

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I looked into it a bit. WhatsApp makes separate contact entries for all your contacts, and Android should recognise the duplicates and merge them into the existing contacts - but clearly, that’s not happening. Try unchecking Settings (Android settings, not WA settings) > Accounts > WhatsApp > WhatsApp > Contacts

That should take care of it, though it could make WhatsApp malfunction slightly. You may have to briefly enable contact sync when you add a new contact that you want to message through WhatsApp.

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Well, I have given that a go and it seems to have worked so I will keep an eye on it.

Either way that was a super quick response so thank you so much! :pray:

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This issue popped back up for me today, right after coming home from Christmas dinner (or at least that’s when I spotted it). Duplicate contacts, caused by WhatsApp. I wanted to find a more elegant solution than the above fix, so I screwed around deep into the night to little avail when finally, I hit upon a solution. The following set of instructions is exactly as I did it, so it may have some superfluous steps - call me superstitious but I’d just do it exactly like this.

  1. Enable airplane mode
  2. Go to Settings > Accounts > three dot menu, uncheck ‘Auto-sync data’ and confirm.
  3. Tap > WhatsApp > WhatsApp > three dot menu > Remove account and confirm
  4. Open your contacts app to see if all duplicates have indeed disappeared
  5. In Settings > Accounts, tap + and select WhatsApp
  6. Turn off airplane mode
  7. In WhatsApp, tap the floating ‘new message’ button
  8. In the contacts list, tap the three dot menu and tap ‘Refresh’
  9. In Settings > Accounts > three dot menu, re-check ‘Auto-sync data’.

So essentially it’s a matter of disabling any synchronisation with the Web (not sure if that’s doing anything, but I don’t use it anyway and I’m not to keen on finding out what happens when I enable it), removing all WhatsApp contacts and then having them be regenerated - I think the duping issue is something to do with transferring WhatsApp data from one device/OS version to the next. Whatever the case, this did it for me. WhatsApp working as it ought to, contacts displaying correctly, fair weather forever.

Edit: I’ve since re-enabled auto-sync and it all still works. K9-mail requires auto-sync to be enabled, so it turns out.

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All done and seems to have worked its magic!

Thank you very much, all the very best for 2020.

S

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