April 30, 2022

Transferring contacts to my new Pixel 6

You would think this would be easy, but it isn't. My old Samsung S4 (Android 5) is set up to sync contacts to my Google account. You would think my new phone would just pick them up. It doesn't.

I have something like 100 contacts, but the new phone gets only 7 of them Looking at my contacts via my desktop browser, I see them partitioned into two classes. There are just "contacts", which are the 7 I get (6 of the 7 with phone numbers). There are also "Frequently contacted", but these have only email addresses, no phone numbers.

I thought I might be able to ove the frequently contacted list to the contacts list by saving it as a VCF file, the pulling it back in to the contacts list, but what this accomplished was to put it back into the frequently contacted list. Now I have 3 duplicates of every contact in that list. There is a "merge" button to fix things like that, but it apparently only works on the 7 contacts in the "contacts" list.

So this is all a mess. It is probably related to the ancient Android on my S4, but who knows really. If I can figure out how to clean up all the duplicates (perhaps I will write a python script to clean up the VCF file, then see if I can delete all my contacts, then pull it back in). Once that is done, I'll enter phone numbers by hand and curse Google every minute while I do it.

Somehow now my Pixel 6 has picked up all of these contacts, but without phone numbers (and apparently without duplicates).

Get rid of PIN screen lock

Go to "Settings" then "Security" and select None for screen lock.

Delete a contact on the Pixel 6

This gets even weirder. I try to delete the contact and the menu at the upper right doesn't offer a way to do so. At the lower right it offers to let me "add to contacts" (isn't it already in contacts? Apparently not.) So I add it, and now I have the ability to delete it. So there is some kind of two tier contacts thing going on that is somewhat hidden. And it gets worse, I try to delete one of these ephemeral contacts and it deletes the primary contact that I want to keep! Now it is telling me the contact doesn't exist (but I see it there to select). This is "as buggy as a bait store".

I can go to "Trash" and recover the contact.

Check the SIM card

Doing searches online is of little value. Google seems to change things all the time and even their own documentation is often out of date.

One suggestion is that contacts may be on the SIM card. I pull the SIM card out of my old phone and discover that it won't fit in any reader I have. I leave the SIM card out, and restart the phone. All my contacts are still there, so it would seem that they aren't on the SIM card (and there is no point on my going shopping for a reader the SIM card will fit into).

Check the old phone

At the bottom of the contacts list, it tells me it sees 313 contacts. So far I have only seen 7 online (and 100 "frequently contacted". Clearly my old phone and the contacts web page are in different worlds.
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Cell Phones / [email protected]