[Neil Attard]

I just purchased a Google Nexus 4 carrying Android version 4.2.1 and when I synchronized with my Google account, I only got 600 of my 3000 Google Contacts on the phone. Funnily enough on my Nexus 7 tablet I have all the contact synchronized, although I first synchronized my tablet over a year ago, when there was a previous android version.

Does anyone know how to get all the contacts synchronized?

[Citizen Coyote]

Make sure you have them all set as visible in the People app. Some might be hidden.

[Neil Attard]

People apps settings is set to display all contacts but still showing part of the full list of contacts. Any other ideas?

[wunderbar]

I believe that it will only pull down the contacts listed in "My contacts" in the contact list, and not the entire "other contacts" list. Most people don't want 3000 contacts on their phone so that was Google's way of making sure only peoples specific contacts, and not every person they've ever interacted with in gmail, gets to phones. Do you have all 3000 contacts in the "my contacts" bit of google Contacts?

[Neil Attard]

Yes all the 3000 contacts are in "My contacts". So you really believe that Google intentionally did that? or they might be a bug on Android's Contacts/People?
Earlier on today I removed and re-installed my Google account on the Nexus 7 tablet, to see if its just on the Nexus 4 or on both Nexus 4 and 7. Before I removed the account I had 3000 in the People app, and now that i re-installed it I have around 600 on the Nexus 7. Remember that when I first linked my Google account to the Nexus 7 tablet there was the previous version of Android back 1 year ago, and now I have the upgrade version.

[gone down south]

Do they all have phone numbers? That's an option you can select, to not show contacts who don't have one.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Android Central Forums

[Neil Attard]

Not all of them have phone numbers. I didn't know about this feature you are mentioning.... how do you do it?

[gone down south]

Not all of them have phone numbers. I didn't know about this feature you are mentioning.... how do you do it?

Not entirely sure how to do it in the stock app, but there's an option somewhere to only display contacts with phone numbers.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Android Central Forums

[Hubertsng]

Did you use a third party application to sync the data? If you didn't then yikes. 3000 contacts??? 600 is a bit much. I got bored inputting 20....

[Citizen Coyote]

Not entirely sure how to do it in the stock app, but there's an option somewhere to only display contacts with phone numbers.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Android Central Forums

I could have sworn this feature existed as well, but could not find it in the People app. You might want to try a third-party contact app and see if it can help grab them all.

Edit: a quick Google search shows this problem is not well-covered online but a few people have reported something similar. I didn't see any solutions, however.

One thing you could try as an experiment is find a contact that's not displaying, copy the info down, delete it from your web-based contacts list, then recreate it. Then force a sync on your phone and see if it shows up. Is there an arbitrary point where the contacts are cutting off (like displaying A-D or something) or are you getting a random assortment from all letters of the alphabet?

[WOP_Drive]

Another reason that some of your contacts might not be visible is Android tends to occasionally merge contacts with the same home address, etc. I then have to go in and "separate" these contacts.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Android Central Forums

[Neil Attard]

so true!

[Neil Attard]

Guys just managed to fix it! Apparently the problem was in the my personal Google contacts account
... Just in case anyone has the same kind of problem:
1. Go to Google Contacts and Extract ALL contacts in CSV
2. Delete the contacts (Note that Google contacts has a recovery tool in case one messes up!)
3. Import the contacts in Google Contacts from the CSV file

That should be it

[mrbenji]

Thanks! This worked perfectly for me... it was driving me crazy that random contacts weren't appearing.