[Q] Desire Contacts Disappearing - Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

I have search this forum and the web and not found a solution... any help gratefully received....
I create a new contact on my Desire as a 'Google Contact' it can be anything someone I actually know or even a made up contact called 'Fred', I enter the details and save it and it shows up in the list of contacts. As soon as the phone syncs with the Google server the contact disappears off my phone and doesn't sync with the Google account.
I have seen other threads where Facebook or Skype is causing a problem, not here as they are not in use, but if I create the contact on the net using the Google contact manager BINGO they sync to my phone. I can't access the web everytime I want to add a new contact, can anyone help?

There is a bug (I think it's HTC Sense related) that means if you create a contact on the phone and add Birthday information the contact will be lost when the phone next synchronises with your Google account. Try adding the contact but not setting anything for the birthday, see if this solves the problem. Add birthday information through the contact manager in GMail for the moment.

Related

Some answers from HTC

I emailed HTC on a few issues so I could get answers straight from them. I'll put them down point by answered point.
Q1. When syncing with your Google account, is it possible to sync with "My Contacts" without syncing with "All Contacts"?
A1. It is not possible to sync just 'My Contacts', it would always be 'Google Contacts, or 'All Contacts'.
(This I already found out from them as it syncs All Contacts first before syncing subgroups. And My Contacts is essentially a subgroup of All Contacts.)
Q2. Is there any way of saving contact vCard (that have been sent to you) to your synced (in my case Google) account? When you are sent a vCal, you have options of where to save it, but no options seem to appear for vCard contact files.
A2. vCards can only be saved as 'My Contacts', they cannit be moved over to 'Google Contacts'. I'm afraid it is not something there is an option for.
Q3. Is there any way of copying/moving a contact saved only on the phone to the set of contacts synced with your Google account? i.e similar to copying/moving from sim to phone, but copying/moving from only on the phone to phone and Google account.
A3. Like in point 2., I'm afraid you cannot change the type of contact once it has been saved, i.e, a Google Contact is always a Google contact, and can't be moved over to My contacts.
Q4. I have noticed that I if I change a birthday for a contact on the phone, the change is always reset to the information held online. Also, I've noticed that if I create a contact on the phone that contains birthday information, that contact will be deleted when the phone syncs. However changing a birthday online will sync to the phone just fine. Am I doing something wrong?
A4. The calender information held online has precedence over the information held on the phone. So if you create a contact with calender information contained within it, when it syncs, the calender information is reomved...as well as the contact information attached. But no, you're not doing anything wrong.
Q5. Regarding the calendar, I have noticed that the Desire will not receive vCal sent via SMS. I am using the same sim card as was in my previous device where I could receive vCal through SMS as well as MMS. Is this a feature of the phone, a setting that I have missed or is the ability to receive vCal via SMS not present?
A5. With regards to vCal, its the latter I'm afraid-vCal cannot be received via SMS, only MMS, Bluetooth or email.
------------------------------------
The only one's that bother me are points 2, 3 and 4. I think we definitely need a way to save contacts sent to us to our synced accounts.
But I don't really get the syncing issue. Maybe he didn't answer my question properly because if you create a contact on the phone without a birthday, it will sync just fine.
The birthday issue is relatively minor. The saving to synced contacts, not so minor.
not convinced by any of those answers whatsoever!
However, not got one at the moment to debunk them.
Mine should arrive tomorrow or the day after, and then i shall be back to prove these answers as wrong, or as a fault in the phone!
Are these really HTC Contact app limitation ... or Google Android limitation related to Google GMail Contacts?
What if we change the contact app to something else from the Market?
Cleargrey said:
I emailed HTC on a few issues so I could get answers straight from them. I'll put them down point by answered point.
Q1. When syncing with your Google account, is it possible to sync with "My Contacts" without syncing with "All Contacts"?
A1. It is not possible to sync just 'My Contacts', it would always be 'Google Contacts, or 'All Contacts'.
(This I already found out from them as it syncs All Contacts first before syncing subgroups. And My Contacts is essentially a subgroup of All Contacts.)
Q2. Is there any way of saving contact vCard (that have been sent to you) to your synced (in my case Google) account? When you are sent a vCal, you have options of where to save it, but no options seem to appear for vCard contact files.
A2. vCards can only be saved as 'My Contacts', they cannit be moved over to 'Google Contacts'. I'm afraid it is not something there is an option for.
Q3. Is there any way of copying/moving a contact saved only on the phone to the set of contacts synced with your Google account? i.e similar to copying/moving from sim to phone, but copying/moving from only on the phone to phone and Google account.
A3. Like in point 2., I'm afraid you cannot change the type of contact once it has been saved, i.e, a Google Contact is always a Google contact, and can't be moved over to My contacts.
Q4. I have noticed that I if I change a birthday for a contact on the phone, the change is always reset to the information held online. Also, I've noticed that if I create a contact on the phone that contains birthday information, that contact will be deleted when the phone syncs. However changing a birthday online will sync to the phone just fine. Am I doing something wrong?
A4. The calender information held online has precedence over the information held on the phone. So if you create a contact with calender information contained within it, when it syncs, the calender information is reomved...as well as the contact information attached. But no, you're not doing anything wrong.
Q5. Regarding the calendar, I have noticed that the Desire will not receive vCal sent via SMS. I am using the same sim card as was in my previous device where I could receive vCal through SMS as well as MMS. Is this a feature of the phone, a setting that I have missed or is the ability to receive vCal via SMS not present?
A5. With regards to vCal, its the latter I'm afraid-vCal cannot be received via SMS, only MMS, Bluetooth or email.
------------------------------------
The only one's that bother me are points 2, 3 and 4. I think we definitely need a way to save contacts sent to us to our synced accounts.
But I don't really get the syncing issue. Maybe he didn't answer my question properly because if you create a contact on the phone without a birthday, it will sync just fine.
The birthday issue is relatively minor. The saving to synced contacts, not so minor.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i have a question regarding point 4
does this mean the whole contact gets deleted or just the calendar entry ?
rhedgehog said:
not convinced by any of those answers whatsoever!
However, not got one at the moment to debunk them.
Mine should arrive tomorrow or the day after, and then i shall be back to prove these answers as wrong, or as a fault in the phone!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'll be waiting! I could do chow down on some more info!
Thanks for the info!
The thing I don't get is this:
A1. It is not possible to sync just 'My Contacts', it would always be 'Google Contacts, or 'All Contacts'.
How can that not be a MAJOR problem?! I got hundreds of mail addresses in there of people I ever wrote to. If they would show up on my phone, that would make the whole sync feature useless.
Or am I missing something?
no entropy, you're not missing anything, it's a major issue to me!
I really hate to have ALL the contacts I wrote to or received a mail from, even for just one time only.
A little work-around is to check the contact option which says something like "only show contacts with telephone number", but it works in Phone contacts only: if you, from the menu, click on search contacts and look for something it will show up with EVERY contact you got in touch on gmail.
It really pisses me off
I am only importing My Contacts on my phone. I don't know how I did it, but I have My Contacts with a few groups,(about 60 contacts) and then I have All Contacts, with over 200 people. None of these show up on my phone...
zonkkk said:
I am only importing My Contacts on my phone. I don't know how I did it, but I have My Contacts with a few groups,(about 60 contacts) and then I have All Contacts, with over 200 people. None of these show up on my phone...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That would be interesting to know!
Are you sure they are not showing just because, maybe, you checked "only show contacts with telephone number"?
Will you test ti by going on the main menu, and click "search contacts" and see you EVERY contact (mail only ones too I mean) shows up?
Thnx
zonkkk said:
I am only importing My Contacts on my phone. I don't know how I did it, but I have My Contacts with a few groups,(about 60 contacts) and then I have All Contacts, with over 200 people. None of these show up on my phone...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
JapanLover said:
That would be interesting to know!
Are you sure they are not showing just because, maybe, you checked "only show contacts with telephone number"?
Will you test ti by going on the main menu, and click "search contacts" and see you EVERY contact (mail only ones too I mean) shows up?
Thnx
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've been a bit troubled by contacts over the past couple of days and been spending a lot of time getting them sorted. All working pretty peachy now but it was a trial.
If may help to read my posts here and here.
goin' home, but will DEFINITELY check your posts!!!
Oh: since you look experienced on GContacts... any clues on progs to sync Outlook other than the good Go Contacts Sync? it works well, but it doesn't updates pics
Haha! Mine arrived this morning while i was at work so took the opportunity to pick it up from home on my lunch break!!
right here we go.
1) bollocks....kinda. It will sync those auto contacts, but you can hide them.
In people, press menu, view.
untick the box next to 'show google auto contacts'
2) bollocks. When you select to import from the SD card, it asks you which account you want to create the contacts under. just select google.
3) bollocks. See answer 2. Export contacts from phone to SD card. Delete copies on phone, import from sd card to google account.
4) i'm still looking at this but i suspect it is linked to facebook. I think it only downloads from facebook and so that overwrites what you put in. if you log out of facebook for HHTC Sense, i suspect the value you put in would appear.
5) this appears to be correct.
However, i happen to know from sources that they didn't have any desire handsets until recently, so don't be too hard on them.
thought, probably just removing the link from a contact to facebook might prove the birthday thing....trying now
Yup, that seems to be it.
When a contact is linked to facebook, you'll see a facebook logo next to their birthday in the contact view (assuming they have put their birthday in)when you actually edit that contact, no birthday is actually saved in the contact.
So it seems that data synced from facebook takes precedence over the local data.
I'll give them bollocks on number 4 because nothing is being deleted at all, and the calendar data seems to be getting synched to google, it's just that the phone will display the facebook data and not the local data.
so that appears to be 4 bollocks out of 5.
And a MAJOR annoyance for me is people tthat have their phone numbers on facebook as just 44xxxxxxx rather than +44xxxxxx or 07xxxxxx meaning you cant send them a text as it fails without the initial + and you can't edit the number as its pulled from facebook.
I have had to unlink several contacts for this reason to get my correct 'local' data to be used insted.
rhedgehog said:
Yup, that seems to be it.
When a contact is linked to facebook, you'll see a facebook logo next to their birthday in the contact view (assuming they have put their birthday in)when you actually edit that contact, no birthday is actually saved in the contact.
So it seems that data synced from facebook takes precedence over the local data.
I'll give them bollocks on number 4 because nothing is being deleted at all, and the calendar data seems to be getting synched to google, it's just that the phone will display the facebook data and not the local data.
so that appears to be 4 bollocks out of 5.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
lol Thanks for that. Firstly, glad you finally have you Desire! The SD card route will have to do for the contacts.
As for the facebook thing, well, I haven't signed in to any facebook account yet as experience has told me to get one set of contacts in working order, and back it up before trying to sync it with another account/system. And still, when I update a birthday on my phone, it won't sync to my Google account. It's not a major thing but it is a minor irritation.
I just did another test of inputting a new test contact into my phone with a birthday (01/02/70) and the contact was deleted on syncing with my Google account. Go figure.
Oh, and it wasn't all bolx! They were half right that you can't directly save a vCard to your Google account. At least give them a one testicle redemption!
ok just to get this straight. it deletes contacts if they have calendar info in them ?
so how do you add new contacts ? first without calendar info, then sync and then go to your google account and change calendar ?
thats just strange and bad
does this only occur for contacts with calendar info in them , or are there other places where this occurs ?
TulpiX said:
ok just to get this straight. it deletes contacts if they have calendar info in them ?
so how do you add new contacts ? first without calendar info, then sync and then go to your google account and change calendar ?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
For me, yes. Try it, let me know what happens when you sync up a new contact with a birthday from your phone to your Google account. Or change the birthday of a contact already synced on your phone and let us know if it changes it in your Google account.
just tried it on mine, on a google contact that was not linked to a facebook account.
The phone shows the birthday no problem, but it does not seem to have synched that up to the google account, even after forcing the sync two or three times....
very odd.
I'm experiencing the same exact problem, new contacts simple get deleted.

Sync ONE GROUP of contacts only with android (HTC Desire)

Hi,
I recently purchased a HTC Desire Android phone and I'm looking for a way to keep a simple, basic contact list updated and synched with my Gmail account.
The problem with the default way on my phone is that it will sync every contact on my Gmail. This is a problem as I only want to have contacts from my phone book synched to one gmail group and vice versa. There is an option to "disply only contacts with numbers" but I still don't like the idea of having every contact on the phone. There is also the problem of the extra empty groups I won't be using, can these be gotten rid of?
I basically just want one list and it to be my default list with all contacts and not have to go through an array of menus to get to that one list on the phone. I don't want that list to be populated by contacts who I may have only emailed once and will never email again. I don't want any gimmicks in between, no gtalk contacts, no facebook contacts, no default gmail contacts and I want to be able to then export this group to a CSV file to use with spreadsheets etc.
This seems to be possible on Android stock and even on HTC Hero Sense UI according to here: androidheadlines.com/2010/04/tidy-up-your-contact-list-with-a-custom-sync-group.html
but in the Desire Sense UI, when you go to people/groups/menu, it only gives the option to delete or add.
Seems this guy is having the same issue, he has the sync group option but his friend doesn't, both using the same phone
androidforums.com/htc-droid-eris/47533-no-sync-groups-option.html
There are reports from this thread that some users have had this same problem. Some have a "Sync Groups" option when they go to People>Group Tab and click menu, most don't have this option however and I'm yet to hear from a desire user with this option. Also from this thread (google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Mobile/thread?tid=0ff2b08f98943ccb&hl=en) one user reported that a "hard reset" gave him the "Sync Group" option. I tried this but had no luck, still the same menu as before.
I've been trying to sort this for days and have asked on multiple forums. Hopefully somebody here can help and I'd appreciate any feedback at all!
If anyone has any idea please share, I've posted this on 5 different websites to try and get it resolved but still no luck. Would it even be possible to use the android "contacts" app as opposed to the HTC DESIRE "people" app at all? I still have my sim card in my old phone until I sort this out and need the phone for work so would really appreciate any help!
If you use exchange to sync your google contacts it will just sync my contacts and not all contacts
Thanks for the reply. I haven't tried exchange yet. Is that a separate system to Google or what is it? How does it have access to Google?
I actually want another group I've made, not "My Contacts" synched witht he phone. Would this still be possible with exchange?
No need for all that.
Go to HTCs program "PEOPLE". Press the hard menu button. Press the soft VIEW menu. Click "only contacts with phone numbers".
Your welcome !
Thanks PauloJ5, I know of that option already but it's still not suitable for my needs. I need the "Sync Group" option that's available on other android and HTC sense systems unfortunately and it just doesn't appear to come on the Desire system
Just a quick, hopeful bump
So according to this thread: http://android.modaco.com/content-page/305926/htc-desire-root-update/page/120/#entry1253966 it seems the MoDaCo founder has rooted the Desire. I wonder will this help at all in being able to resolve this issue?
In the sync options in Android, there is an option for exchange sync. Google servers support exchange sync, so you can add your google account. In the options, put in your google email as username, along with your password. Put m.google.com as server.
I would then disable google contact synchronization, and enable exchange contact sync. You might want to delete all the google contacts on your phone that have been previously stored to get rid of them (use the view option in the people manager to select just these). Not sure what this will do to your google contacts on the servers so I would back them up first (use export in google contacts on the web). Then do an exchange sync.
This will just sync your "my contacts" and not "all contacts". It won't let you sync specific groups.
Thanks again sawfoot, but if it can only sync mycontacts and not other specific groups I choose then it's not a solution for me unfortunately
It's just funny that the solution I need has been on other versions of Sense UI and also on the Android Stock but they seemed to have taken the most important function for me away from the phone I decided to go with
Just thought I'd give this another quick bump since the Root method and instructions for the desire have now been released. Perhaps a solution can be had
Just thought I'd give this another hopeful bump in the off chance of somebody who may have solved the issue on the desire (now that it's been rooted) seeing it I'm still waiting on HTC to get back to me too!
So with the extensive help of partyatmygaff over msn, I was able to root my desire and I finally got the contacts app working on it! I saved the chat transcript as it may be helpful for anyone else wanting to install from Windows XP. This is an ultra dumbed down version. I made sure to ask as many questions as possible, even if I was 99% sure of the answer myself
Some of the files were sent to me over msn like the market enabler etc, but these should be easily found online anyway. Also, the program I use for the commant prompt is called "command prompt here" I think, but you can just type in the address of the folder in DOS if you know how anyway!
You can see the transcript here: http://www.vantasks.ie/xpdesireroot.html
There is a good bit of filler, but it really covers absolutely everything you need to know so once you get to the bottom of the page, your desire should be rooted and ready to go
So I got the contacts sync thing working anyway, I can now sync with my chosen group from Gmail, but I can't believe it, if I have this group selected and I save a new contact, it wont save to that group, but just the "all contacts" group even though that's not selected
Always something! The guy in post 10 here: http://androidcommunity.com/forums/f9/add-or-edit-contact-groups-12668/ seems to have got it going, but as you can see in my reply, post 11, it's not saving to the desired group for me!

HTC Desire - Issue with contacts

I recently took delivery of my new HTC desire and am well pleased. However, yesterday I noticed something strange which has annoyed me a little
I generally store all my contacts on the exchange server. I synced the desire with the exchange server and it did download all mail, contacts and calendar. I noticed I could set the conacts widget to display contacts within a certain group, so I created a group called Favorites and edited frequent contacts so they appear in that group. I did this in outlook. Also around the same time, the desire linked them up with facebook and got the photos etc. So far, pretty cool
Now the annoying bit, checking my contacts in outlook again, I was horrified to see the entire Favorites group missing I checked my phone and the contacts were there. It is not in my google contact list. I can imagine that it has linked it to facebook or something. My question is how do I know the source for the contact now? I know I added a new contact yesterday and there was an option to specify if the contact should belong to my exchange account or the gmail one and as usual I always add it to my exchange account. Now when I view the new contact in outlook, it has a cateory of 'HTC Favorite' instead of just Favorite, even though the category in the desire says 'Favorite'
Sorry if this is a confusing post, but it has confused the crap out of me. I love the desire but if it is going to move my contacts about it will annoy the living daylights out of me
Anyone has any clues regarding this?
I installed the HTC synch manager, thinking that it would resynch the missing contacts back to my outlook. But to my horror, it has duplicated all the outlook contacts back to the phone. So now I have 2 of each contact. And the required contacts are still missing
I can't delete them all and resynch because I have missing contacts in my outlook and not even sure if it will delete the contacts from the exchange server
Why can't they make it just work, this used to work great with windows mobile, never faced any issues. Anyone know how I can get the source for the contact? and possibly how I can get it back to the exchange server?
Help, please

LinkedIn for HTC Sense - Strange behavior with own contact

Hi guys,
I decided to set up my linkedin account with HTC sense after discovering the plugin in HTC Hub. I added my account as usual and discovered that instead of attaching the account to my existing own contact (i.e. 'Me' in the 'People' app), it created a new contact with my name just for my linkedin profile! This only happens for me, not my contacts...
Has anyone experienced this too or did I run into a weird bug? Do you guys have a suggestion or some sort of a solution to merge the two (somehow, I can't link the contact with 'Me')? Removing and readding the account doesn't seem to help. I know that's a small inconvenience, but it's quite annoying to have to scroll down to acceess my profile (got lots of contacts and my first name starts with a V :S).
Thanks

Can't create / sync Google contacts?

Maybe I'm an idiot, and forgive me if I'm asking a dumb question, but this feels like something that should be easy but I can't figure it out.
This is my first HTC. On every other phone dating all the way back to my Galaxy S2, when I created a contact, it would ask if I wanted to save it on my phone or as a Google contact (or automatically save it to whichever of those two I had told it to do by default.) Saving it as a Google contact automatically synced it to my Google account.
When I set up my HTC 10, it downloaded all of my Google contacts. Easy!
Tonight, when somebody texted me they got a new number, I went to change it on a contact that already exists; it asked which contact I wanted to edit: their phone contact or their Google contact. Changing their Google contact didn't update the phone contact.
So then I just deleted his contact, and created it anew; it only asks if I want to create it on the phone or on the SIM card, with no Google contact option. Furthermore, creating it on the phone doesn't sync it to Google, nor does creating it on Google sync it to the phone.
Is there something I'm missing here? Is this some HTC specific thing where it just doesn't do Google contacts? Any help on this would be much, much appreciated; I'd really only rather maintain the Google contacts and not have to micromanage contact lists or use a third party syncing app (but I guess I will if it comes to it).
NEVER MIND!
You can ignore me.
For whatever reason, "contacts" wasn't available to check in my sync settings. But I fixed it:
Removed my Google account
Deleted all local phone contacts (to avoid possible duplicates later)
Added my Google account again
"Contacts" is in the Sync settings again, re-synced all my contacts without problems.
No idea what caused it but there you go. I thought I was going crazy because I had no option to sync contacts. If anybody knows what may have caused it I'd be interested to hear, but otherwise just ignore this post :-/
Thank you! I had the same problem and couldn't add contacts to my Google list. I did the same (logged out of account and logged back in) and the sync contacts came back along with the ability to add contacts again. I wonder why that happened.
I'm having similar issues with my HTC 10, majority of my contacts are synced on my Gmail account but I'm missing about 4 numbers, the contact details are there like name but no phone number. I've checked my phone and the contact has a phone number and linked to other accounts like whatsapp but no info on Gmail contacts.
I did manually input the number onto my phone because the numbers was missing so I believe maybe it's the format on the HTC 10, I'll do more testing...
sync google accounts
It's been a while since I've been through this, but unfortunately I have a similar problem. My problem is "Google account" in accounts and sync. But I can only select google photos when I click on the sync mark. No selection box for contacts. How can I fix that?
The device has clone s3 and ics 4.0.4 on it. The gapps packages available for this release also do not work. It does not synchronize people in any case. I cleaned the data from the applications, I deleted Accounts.db and reinstalled it.
Finally, I found the following lines for Accounts.xml and added it, but still there is no positive situation. What else can I do? Thank you.
Syncable = "true"> <authority id = "3" account = ".." type = "com.google" authority = "com.android.contacts"
<PeriodicSync period = "86400" />
</ Authority>
Let me add this here, please:
https://forum.xda-developers.com/htc-10/help/google-account-syncing-t3561756
Xenorin said:
Maybe I'm an idiot, and forgive me if I'm asking a dumb question, but this feels like something that should be easy but I can't figure it out.
This is my first HTC. On every other phone dating all the way back to my Galaxy S2, when I created a contact, it would ask if I wanted to save it on my phone or as a Google contact (or automatically save it to whichever of those two I had told it to do by default.) Saving it as a Google contact automatically synced it to my Google account.
When I set up my HTC 10, it downloaded all of my Google contacts. Easy!
Tonight, when somebody texted me they got a new number, I went to change it on a contact that already exists; it asked which contact I wanted to edit: their phone contact or their Google contact. Changing their Google contact didn't update the phone contact.
So then I just deleted his contact, and created it anew; it only asks if I want to create it on the phone or on the SIM card, with no Google contact option. Furthermore, creating it on the phone doesn't sync it to Google, nor does creating it on Google sync it to the phone.
Is there something I'm missing here? Is this some HTC specific thing where it just doesn't do Google contacts? Any help on this would be much, much appreciated; I'd really only rather maintain the Google contacts and not have to micromanage contact lists or use a third party syncing app (but I guess I will if it comes to it).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Halo !!!
I have same trouble with sync on my htc 10, but I think the problem is not only in the phone, because I have the same google account on another phone, ( alcatel idol 3) and also the same problems with contacts. For example, a sudden disappearance, a certain number of contacts, from my contacts list in both phone ???? On htc 10, a special problem is synchronization is not always possible, I have auto sync on, but the contacts cant be synced when I want to do, but in follow a few days thay are.
That,s whot i do not understand, I tried cleaning cash, and re-installing Google Account, but the problem comes back after a while, so..thats it. If anyone knows something more, would like to here. Thanks !!!
If Power Saver mode is enabled, Contacts Sync is disabled. Sounds crazy but just disable Power Saver (on HTC it's under Settings->Power->Power saver) and the contact sync will start right up. No need to remove and recreate your google account, restart the phone, or any of that - just flip the one switch.

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