Save yourself from insanity… Google and Outlook contacts on Android

Recently I had to factory reset my HTC One M8 whilst it was in for a repair (thanks to a stray bottle of soy sauce landing square on the screen, ouch!) but since reinstalling all my apps I noticed my contacts sync wasn’t working correctly.

Although my Google account had synced contacts when first setting things up the People app would’t let me add a new contact to my Google account. Rather it would default to SIM instead. Very strange I thought, it’s never done that before and I could still see everything else that was already there. Oddly the filter menu wouldn’t list “Google” as an option either.

Initial thoughts

First I thought maybe the app permissions after the Android M update may have gone wonky so checked those, no problems there (People app had access to Contacts permission).

Next… maybe the Google Account sync had Contacts sync turned off but after checking it’s there and working fine.
As another test I created a new contact online via Google Contacts and then forced a sync on the phone… contact didn’t appear. Very odd.

Tried a few other ideas like clearing App caches, also cleared the Android cache partition via Recovery as I’d been having some issues with the HTC Camera app as well but no joy there either (although Camera app now seems to have sorted itself out so a bit of a bonus there).

Solution – turn off Outlook contacts!

Finally I came across this…

http://forums.androidcentral.com/google-nexus-5/350303-phone-contacts-not-syncing-google-account-contacts-2.html

Credit to “haneyman” for this…

Confirmed, you cannot have Outlook sync contacts and expect Google contacts to sync. As soon as I unlinked the Outlook account on my phone, the Google contacts appeared.

So it seems the Outlook app is the culprit. To confirm I went into the sync options for my Outlook.com account and sure enough contacts sync was enabled. Turned that off, cleared my running apps then sure enough on next load the People app was letting me create and sync Google contacts again.

Maybe having accounts on both Google and Microsoft is a bit unusual but definitely one to watch out for if you have a foot in both camps and use an Android smartphone.