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