Question about contacts, iPhone and Android

Status
Not open for further replies.
Joined
Jun 24, 2004
Messages
14,505
Location
Top of Virginia
I just upgraded to an iPhone 4S from an HTC Incredible 2. As some of you may know, contacts in Android/Gmail can become rather cumbersome to maintain properly. You have "phone contacts" and you have "gmail contacts" and you sometimes have "other contacts" as well. When Verizon moved my "contacts" across to the iPhone, I got duplicates of most contacts (one with a phone number and one with an email address), and I got many email-only contacts. Obviously, I didn't set my contacts up this way, but Android was showing them to me consolidated into one contact item.

To be sure, there are pros and cons to this. One "pro" is that you don't have to worry about how the contacts are organized; they all just "show up". One "con" is that if you ever switch platforms, or even just export a list of contacts to a CSV file or something, you get a scrambled mess. My wife went throught this same thing when she upgraded to an iPhone a few months ago.

Someone who has had the iOS platform for a while...are contacts organized better than they are in Android? That is, if you sync your contacts with iCloud, the phone isn't going to keep multiple lists of contacts is it? An "iCloud contacts" and a "phone contacts" list, etc?

Interestingly, Google and Apple seem to be furthering the distance between them. You cannot sync Gmail contacts with an Apple device. You can sync mail and calendars, but not contacts. Other services are fine (like Yahoo), but Gmail won't let the Apple device sync contacts. If rumors are true about upcoming changs in iOS 6 (like a new Apple maps and navigation application), I can see the divide between the mobile divisions of Apple and Google continue to grow.
 
Well, I'm a long-time iPhone user but I can't make myself join the "cloud" yet, so no help there.

One thing that is nice... when you sync your phone to your computer, you can use iCal on the computer to edit your contacts, then re-load to the phone. Yes, its still a manual process, but at least its easier to edit on a real computer than on the tiny iPhone screen.

If you have a PC, I'm not sure what tools are available to help you there. I use both PCs and Macs pretty much interchangeably (and I run Windows on my Mac sometimes) but since the tool is already there I have always used iTunes and iCal on the Mac to manage my phone.

In general, I think the iPhone contacts system is the best and easiest to use that I've found. But as you are finding, the downside to all that functionality is that its not compatible with everything. Its a lot like the days in the late 90s and early 2000s when EVERYthing was available for Windows and lots of web pages worked in Explorer but not in Mozilla or Safari, because Microsoft had added so much "non-standard" functionality to its products.

Sorry if that's not much help.
 
Thanks, and it is. We recently switched our desktop environment from a Windows machine to an OS X iMac (currently 10.7.4, with plans to install Mountain Lion when it becomes available). iCloud integration is about half there in Lion, as I can see my calendar events on iCal on the Mac, and I even get alerted on the Mac when I have a calendar event, the same as with the iPhone. This iCloud integration will get even stronger in 10.8 as I understand.

Anyway, it is appearing to me that Apple has contacts management down to a better science than others. And I CAN update them no matter where I am, if I'm on my iPhone, iMac, or any PC going to icloud.com. So it seems that it's doing what it should be doing: hosting and synchronizing just ONE list of contacts.
 
Originally Posted By: Hokiefyd
I just upgraded to an iPhone 4S from an HTC Incredible 2. As some of you may know, contacts in Android/Gmail can become rather cumbersome to maintain properly. You have "phone contacts" and you have "gmail contacts" and you sometimes have "other contacts" as well.


This must be an iPhone phenomenon. Contacts are seamlessly maintained on my Android phone betwixt itself and my gmail account.
 
Syncing contacts was always a source of frustration for me on my iPhone after I started using Google voice. I was never able to seemlessly integrate gv into my iPhone. Now that I'm using an Android, gv works flawlessly and all my contacts are in one place in the gv cloud. I'm able to update my list using my phone and PC. Ironically I cannot update it from an Apple mobile device. So I agree with you. they will get further they apart over time and I think one will have to chose a Google lifestyle or an iClou lifestyle.
 
Last edited:
Originally Posted By: scurvy
Originally Posted By: Hokiefyd
I just upgraded to an iPhone 4S from an HTC Incredible 2. As some of you may know, contacts in Android/Gmail can become rather cumbersome to maintain properly. You have "phone contacts" and you have "gmail contacts" and you sometimes have "other contacts" as well.


This must be an iPhone phenomenon. Contacts are seamlessly maintained on my Android phone betwixt itself and my gmail account.


Well, that's one way to put it, but the bottom line is that its just two semi-incompatible systems. You have to remember that Google IS both Android and gmail, so of course they play nice together just like iCloud, iPhone, and iCal all play nice together. Windows Phone users (both of them...) probably have the same issues with gmail AND with the Apple products.

We almost got past the petty rivalries there a few years ago, but Google's rise in the OS and application software markets has brought forth some new ones.
 
Originally Posted By: scurvy
Contacts are seamlessly maintained on my Android phone betwixt itself and my gmail account.


Right. But therein lies the problem. Cross-platform interoperability isn't that great. If you later move to a Windows phone or to an Apple phone, you may have a mess of contacts to go through.

Check this out: log into Gmail and view your Contacts. On the left tool bar, you'll see what is most likely "My Contacts" highlighted. There are a few other contacts lists. Notably, you likely also have an "Other Contacts" list. If you click on that, and if yours is similar to mine, you'll have a disparate list of contacts and email addresses that either Gmail or Android has been maintaining separate from the main list.

Gmail/Android knows how to handle that, because it's proprietary to that system. But if you do a contacts "dump" to another device, you may have a lot of duplicates and/or extraneous contacts to wade through.

And that's what I was originally asking. I hope that Apple does it more efficiently, working with only one contacts list instead of at least two. And so far at least, it does appear that there is only one list.
 
Originally Posted By: VeeDubb
they will get further they apart over time and I think one will have to chose a Google lifestyle or an iClou lifestyle.


That's what it looks like to me as well. Apple has a lot of critics for making many UI type things like this hard to access or hard to integrate in or from other platforms. It seems that other vendors are also jumping into that same operating mode: trying to capture you more and more into a single line of devices (Apple, Google, whatever). I guess I was a bit disappointed to see that Google, which markets itself as an open-source, works-with-all type of platform, seems to be engaging in the same type of stuff.

I guess it's only good business sense though.
 
Do we know whether the fact that Google doesn't integrate with Apple products is Google's doing or Apple's doing? I know iTunes doesn't play well with my PCs and I always thought it was an Apple thing to get you to switch to the Apple ecosystem. On the other hand, Google software like Music, and its PC apps work pretty seamlessly.
 
Originally Posted By: VeeDubb
Do we know whether the fact that Google doesn't integrate with Apple products is Google's doing or Apple's doing? I know iTunes doesn't play well with my PCs and I always thought it was an Apple thing to get you to switch to the Apple ecosystem. On the other hand, Google software like Music, and its PC apps work pretty seamlessly.


I don't know, and I wonder. I tend to think this is Google trying to "encourage" users to use Google-based hardware. For example, you can have iCloud sync the full suite in Yahoo (mail, contacts, calendar, etc). Same with Hotmail, which is Microsoft. But with Google, you can only sync mail and calendar. You cannot sync contacts automatically. You can manually drag them back and forth, but there is no two-way sync. To me, this says that Google only releases contact sync permissions to other members of the so-called Google ecosystem.

And one would think that Apple only stands to lose/frustrate consumers if this is their doing. Having a Gmail account doesn't preclude anyone from having an iPhone. In fact, I use Gmail, at least currently, and have an iPhone. But if Google is going to be a pistol about interoperability, I may chose a different mail service that allows me to use the hardware that I want to use. I could move to Yahoo mail, with which I have full interoperability.

So it seems to me that this is not Apple's choice. At least not in total. I could be wrong though.

I've also had iTunes on my Windows PC for two years prior, and it always ran fine. Most everybody I know has iPods syncing up with iTunes on Windows PCs, so I think it generally works okay. Ironically, I've had better luck with Apple software on non-Apple hardware (like QuickTime, iTunes, etc) than the other way around.
 
Yeah, itunes on PC works fine. My wife uses google mail and it integrates fine contacts-wise onto her iphone. If anything, it seems that there are too many as it seems to pull every one down. But I have not heard her commenting about multiple contacts... granted she didnt transfer her contacts from an open source OS that possibly has to save every contact as a text file or something like that...
 
Originally Posted By: JHZR2
Yeah, itunes on PC works fine. My wife uses google mail and it integrates fine contacts-wise onto her iphone. If anything, it seems that there are too many as it seems to pull every one down. But I have not heard her commenting about multiple contacts... granted she didnt transfer her contacts from an open source OS that possibly has to save every contact as a text file or something like that...


Look at the "Mail, Contacts, Calendars" settings panel on her iPhone. I'll bet you a quart of motor oil that the Gmail account does not offer to synchronize contacts. Mine offers me Mail, Calendars, and Notes. It's the same way in 10.7 on the iMac. Now Yahoo? You can synchronize mail, contacts, calendars, reminders, and notes, on the iMac and iPhone, doesn't matter.

You'll also note that you cannot have Gmail set to push email to an iPhone. If you look in the advanced options for Fetch New Data panel, you can see that the Gmail account type does not support push. You can have it set to "Fetch" at certain increments (15 mins, 30 mins, etc) or you can have it not fetch at all and only Manual download of mail.

Whatever Apple and Google have against each other is annoying. The more I poke around, the more limitations there are when it's an Apple-Google interoperability thing.
 
Originally Posted By: scurvy
Originally Posted By: Hokiefyd
I just upgraded to an iPhone 4S from an HTC Incredible 2. As some of you may know, contacts in Android/Gmail can become rather cumbersome to maintain properly. You have "phone contacts" and you have "gmail contacts" and you sometimes have "other contacts" as well.


This must be an iPhone phenomenon. Contacts are seamlessly maintained on my Android phone betwixt itself and my gmail account.


Google is Android. So yes, your google gmail contacts would sync well with your google android phone. iCloud, all of apples apps like contacts, calendar, photos, ect. . . . Sync well with all of apples Products. The issues can spring up when you try to sync apple to android or android to apple. Some stuff syncs fine. A lot does not though....

So...

It's not a "iPhone" thing. It's a completely different operating system thing.

When I made the switch from android to iPhone, my new cell phone carrier asked if I wanted to transfer my contacts. I did, and I too had 100s of email addresses transferred into my contacts as well as quite a few clones of all my contacts. Most email addresses I only emailed once years ago. If anything, it's an issue with google/android storing all those "contacts" even after I delete the email I sent or recieved from some random address that I did not physically store or save in the first place...

I have a Mac, so I just synced my messed up contacts to the Mac, sorted out what I wanted to keep, then re-synced the new "correct" contacts back onto the iPhone.

If you have a PC, I think you can still do that with iTunes.
Check google and YouTube to see if someone put up a walk through.
 
I distinctly remember that in the past I could send link to Google Docs document to any email recipient. Last couple of times when I sent the link, the recipient was not able to access it unless he had a gmail address. When did Google become obnoxious?
 
Originally Posted By: Hokiefyd
Originally Posted By: JHZR2
Yeah, itunes on PC works fine. My wife uses google mail and it integrates fine contacts-wise onto her iphone. If anything, it seems that there are too many as it seems to pull every one down. But I have not heard her commenting about multiple contacts... granted she didnt transfer her contacts from an open source OS that possibly has to save every contact as a text file or something like that...


Look at the "Mail, Contacts, Calendars" settings panel on her iPhone. I'll bet you a quart of motor oil that the Gmail account does not offer to synchronize contacts. Mine offers me Mail, Calendars, and Notes. It's the same way in 10.7 on the iMac. Now Yahoo? You can synchronize mail, contacts, calendars, reminders, and notes, on the iMac and iPhone, doesn't matter.

You'll also note that you cannot have Gmail set to push email to an iPhone. If you look in the advanced options for Fetch New Data panel, you can see that the Gmail account type does not support push. You can have it set to "Fetch" at certain increments (15 mins, 30 mins, etc) or you can have it not fetch at all and only Manual download of mail.

Whatever Apple and Google have against each other is annoying. The more I poke around, the more limitations there are when it's an Apple-Google interoperability thing.


If you set your gmail account up as an exchange account, you can sync contacts. And, like you've already figured out, it will give you push.
 
I stumbled across a tweak that you can make in Gmail so that it will NOT auto-save anyone you contact. Apparently, this is enabled by default and makes for a very messy contacts list, as mine was. You can disable this feature, so that only contacts that you personally and specifically add will become part of your contacts list. See the Lifehacker article below for more information.

Article on Lifehacker.com
 
All mine came across perfectly(Incredible->iphone using google). The Verizon store employee did it for me. I believe she set it up as an Exchange account.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top