How do I remove Google Contacts from Android Phone?

[stlsooner]

I just returned to Android after some time away by purchasing a Galaxy S7 Edge (immediately upgraded to Nougat 7.0).

My master list of contacts is on my live.com account managed by Outlook on Windows 10. These are the up-to-date contacts that I want to show in Phone. I have set up the live.com on Android, set it to sync contacts, and it syncs fine. Gmail is also set up since it is my main e-mail source. It originally synced Gmail contacts but when I discovered it, I immediately turned that sync off because any Google contacts are holdovers and potentially out of date. Here is the problem:

I can't tell Phone what contacts to use (so far as can tell) so I assume that it uses whatever is showing in the Contacts app. I set the Contacts app to only show live.com.

Now John Doe is in the contacts. He formerly lived in Boston, let's say, and now lives in Denver. When I open contacts I see both addresses -- Boston and Denver! But the outdated Google contact is the only one that has the Boston address; the up-to-date live.com contact has only the Denver address. And the latter is the only thing I've selected for contacts to show. So why am I seeing the address that is in Google only?

Investigation showed that if I look at Linked Contacts, I see a Google record for John Doe and a Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync (live.com) record for John Doe. But I specifically don't want any of the Google records showing since they are out-of-date. Is the Google phone app going to FORCE me to use them, or do I have an alternative?

Any help would be appreciated.

I wasn't sure if this was an Android apps question or an Android 7.0 question, so apologies if I posted it the wrong place.

Thanks.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Moved from the Android Apps forum to the General Help forum, since the former is intended for developers to promote their apps.

Try this:

1. Go to Settings>Accounts-Google>[your account], and make sure Contacts sync is turned off.
2. Next, go to Settings>Apps, tap Menu>Show System, and select Contact Storage. Clear Cache/Data.
3. Now open the Contacts app again, and wait a few seconds for it to resync contacts from Live.com. Does it now only show the entries from Live.com?

 

[stlsooner]

Thanks for moving this to the right forum, and thanks for the suggestion.

I had already turned off syncing of Google contacts, but had not know about deleting or clearing cache.

So I cleared the cache and deleted. Seemed to make sense. Went back to the Contacts app. All the information had either not deleted or had been resynced by the time I got there. Both the live.com contact and the linked Google contact are still there.

 

[B. Diddy]

Just to be sure -- you cleared the cache and data for the Contact Storage app, not the Contacts app, correct?

Also, look to see if the contacts were Joined or Merged at some point. If so, there should be an option to Unjoin or Unmerge the contacts.

 

[Mooncatt]

Try this.

Go into phone settings>accounts, turn off auto sync, and sign out of your Google account. Now go into your phone contacts and see if the Google contacts are deleted. I don't remember if it happens automatically. If they are still there, look in your contact settings and see if there's a way to display contacts only from certain accounts. This way you can manually delete the Google contacts without worrying about the Live contacts.

Once you've verified the Google contacts are gone, go back into your phone settings>accounts. This is where your phone may differ from mine, so I'll try to make things clear either way. Follow the exact order of steps to prevent accidental re-sync.

Keeping auto sync turned off, sign into your Google account. Once in, put your phone in airplane mode so it has zero data connection. Now turn auto sync on. Tap on your Google account to see the list of services that can sync (contacts, Chrome, Calender, etc). Turn the option to sync contacts off. Now turn airplane mode off.

This should prevent the Google contacts from showing up again. If you don't want them period, then sign into your Google account in a browser and you can go through your account settings to permanently delete them.

 

[stlsooner]

I went back and checked to be sure. Yes it was in Settings | Apps | Show System Apps | Contacts | Storage. I looked for a place where that option might appear in the Contacts app and couldn't find it.

I haven't seen a message that the contacts were joined or merged, nor have I been able to find an option anywhere to Unjoin or Unmerge (though I may simply be missing it from not knowing where to look). What I did find, when I went to the specific contact that alerted me to the problem in the first place, was a menu option of Manage Linked Contacts. When I checked it, it showed an entry for the contact John Doe on Google, and another entry for the contact John Doe on Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync. I did notice, interestingly enough, that I tried edit to see what would happen and I got the option to edit with a separate tab for each account. Could this be indication they weren't merged or joined?

 

[stlsooner]

As you suggested I turned off auto sync. But I couldn't see an option to sign out of my Google account. Odd, I thought. So I searched and found that apparently you can't really sign out. You can delete the account. But given that so many other things like the store require it, I'm not sure if an android phone can get past its separation anxiety from not having a Google account on the phone. (?) In seriousness, is deleting the account the only way to sign out -- and what else does it affect? [Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge Nougat 7.0 in case that matters].

I did earlier turn the sync contacts option off, but they were already on the phone, so that had no effect, as you might imagine.

 

[Mooncatt]

As you suggested I turned off auto sync. But I couldn't see an option to sign out of my Google account. Odd, I thought. So I searched and found that apparently you can't really sign out. You can delete the account. But given that so many other things like the store require it, I'm not sure if an android phone can get past its separation anxiety from not having a Google account on the phone. (?) In seriousness, is deleting the account the only way to sign out -- and what else does it affect? [Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge Nougat 7.0 in case that matters].

I did earlier turn the sync contacts option off, but they were already on the phone, so that had no effect, as you might imagine.

Then you may have to remove the account all together instead of simply logging out (though it's effectively the same thing), and that I think does automatically remove the contacts. Android may gripe at you, but you will be adding it back. So I don't see this causing any big problems.

Simply turning auto sync off isn't going to work, and why I listed the steps in that order. So first you start with a clean slate by removing the account. Then turn auto sync off. This lets you now sign back in without having Google trying to immediately load everything on you. The problem here is with auto sync off, you won't have the options in the account to selectively turn off the individual sync options. That's why you go into airplane mode; allowing you to turn auto sync back on to get access to those other options but still preventing Google from syncing on you. Now you can turn off contact sync before Google has a chance to even phone home, so to speak. Once set, then you can come out of airplane mode.

I've had to do this a number of times on my phones when upgrading because I keep a couple Google accounts on it, but only want the contacts for one in my address book.

 

[B. Diddy]

What I did find, when I went to the specific contact that alerted me to the problem in the first place, was a menu option of Manage Linked Contacts. When I checked it, it showed an entry for the contact John Doe on Google, and another entry for the contact John Doe on Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync. I did notice, interestingly enough, that I tried edit to see what would happen and I got the option to edit with a separate tab for each account. Could this be indication they weren't merged or joined?

That does sound like the contact info from both your Google account and your Exchange account got joined together. In that Manage Linked Contacts menu, can you delete the contact info from the Google account?

 

[stlsooner]

That does sound like the contact info from both your Google account and your Exchange account got joined together. In that Manage Linked Contacts menu, can you delete the contact info from the Google account?

Assuming you mean all the contact information, I'm not sure how to do that unless Mooncatt's method works.

 

[stlsooner]

That makes sense. Admittedly I'm a bit hesitant, but since you've done it before successfully, I'll give it a try.

 

[stlsooner]

Well that didn't work out well. Now every time I hit an icon -- Contacts, Phone, or Play Store -- the icon simply jumps up to become a smaller icon on a light band at the top of the screen. So I tap it up there and jumps back down to the start screen. An endless loop, but won't open. So I can't tell if the contacts are gone or not, so I'm stuck on that step.

 

[stlsooner]

I see now some of what happened. Being new to Android I've found that you can drag icons to the to the move bar at the top, then drag them down on another screen. At that point you can open them. In this case it put them on the move bar, but when you put them on a screen and tried to open them they just bounced back up to the move bar again. Not sure why that happened. Restoring the phone fixed that problem, but the original problem remains.

 

[stlsooner]

Mooncatt, I decided to try again your method because I believe you know what you're talking about and what happened when I first tried it was, I suspect, some sort of anomaly. The first time I did it this morning it worked, but then reverted back. So I went through the following steps, writing them down to be sure I wasn't missing anything.

1. Settings | Clouds & Accounts | Accounts | (selected main Google account) | Menu | Remove Account. (Note: the secondary Google account has no contacts in it.
2. Went to Contacts and confirmed that the Google Contacts were deleted.
3. Clouds & Accounts | Accounts | Menu | Turn off AutoSync.
4. Confirmed in Contacts that Google contacts were still not present.
5. Settings | CLoud and Accounts | Add Account -- and added main Google account.
6. Put phone in airplane mode.
7. Went to Contacts and confirmed that Google contacts still were not there.
8. Settings | Cloud & Accounts | Accounts Turn on auto sync.
9. Went to Contacts and confirmed that Google contacts were still not there.
10. Settings | Cloud & Accounts | Accounts | Google -- selected main Google account that I'd just added back. Turned off "Sync Contacts", "Sync People details", "Sync Google Fit data." Left on "Sync App Data", "Sync Calendar", "Sync Gmail." All other Syncs are off.
11. Turned airplane mode off.

Now it works! My secondary account became primary in the process, so I deleted it and added it back, and now the correct account is primary.

I appreciate very much your taking the time to write this out. I'm not sure how I missed the directions the first couple of times I tried it (probably my lack of familiarity with Android having just moved to it) but I can confirm that it does work, and again, thanks so much. This solves a major difficulty.

 

[Mooncatt]

Glad I could help. I know how frustrating this can be because it took a lot of trial and error to find the right order to do things in when I had the issue.

 

[kurtd]

Those steps worked for me as well although I didn't need a temp google account. They should really ask you what to sync when adding an account since it's so difficult to remove. Thanks

 

[relietz]

Thank you so much! This worked like a charm. Completely cleared the contact list from my phone without affecting the actual contacts stored on each account, and immediately after opening the contact app, it automatically began repopulating the list on the phone with only the account actually set to sync. Exactly what I needed!

For anyone having trouble with this, ensure you are not selecting "Contacts" from the list of apps, but "Contacts Storage" - then when in the settings for the app called "Contacts Storage," select the section labeled Storage, and continue on with the instructions from there.

Welcome to Android Central! Moved from the Android Apps forum to the General Help forum, since the former is intended for developers to promote their apps.

Try this:

1. Go to Settings>Accounts-Google>[your account], and make sure Contacts sync is turned off.
2. Next, go to Settings>Apps, tap Menu>Show System, and select Contact Storage. Clear Cache/Data.
3. Now open the Contacts app again, and wait a few seconds for it to resync contacts from Live.com. Does it now only show the entries from Live.com?

 

[rood15]

I tried all of the steps from stlsooner in post 14, and it worked, but then my contacts came back a little while later. Grrr.

I have a Moto G5 Plus. Per other ideas on this thread, I do not have a Contacts Storage app, only Contacts.

Any ideas about what else I can try? I'm debating simply going through and deleting all the contacts on my phone since I don't want to have any on there. My end goal is keeping contacts in Google but off my phone.

 

[Rukbat]

Turn off Contacts sync (in Accounts). Delete all your contacts in the phone. Done.

(Of course, making phone calls will be difficult, since you won't have anyone's number in the phone.)

Or do you only want to see the contacts that are synced to Google when you look in Contacts in your phone? Then keep all your accounts as Google accounts, and keep sync on.

The advantage of keeping all your contacts as Google contacts, and the main disadvantage of keeping them all as Phone contacts, is that you have them all backed up. (They're still physically on the phone as well as on the Google server, so you don't need a data connection so use them.) But if you ever lose the phone, have it driven over, have it freeze to the point that it can't be fixed, etc., etc., you've lost all your contacts unless they're Google contacts. And if they are, getting them back is as trivial as putting that Google account on the phone and making sure that Contacts sync is on (which is the default). Dozens of contacts, hundreds of contacts (someone here once complained about having to manually add a few thousand contacts) - all a few taps away.

Don't worry about someone at Google getting your contacts. The people (and there aren't many) at Google who have access to backed up data won't play that sort of game, and there are too many safeguards in place even if they decided to. (I used to be in that position - looking at the databases of thousands of customers. You get to a record and have completely forgotten the record you worked on 20 seconds ago. When you work at that level you do the job, you don't memorize or write down data. A US phone number in Chicago with a 323 area code? That's a typo, change it to 312. Next record. A NYC address with a 21235 zipcode? Another typo - change it to 11235. Next record. You finished that database? It's all gone from your mind. You were thinking about the dinner you're having that evening anyway, you weren't paying any more attention to the data than you had to.)

 

[rood15]

If the solution is to go nuclear on my phone contacts, I will. Google getting my data isn't the issue. (They already have it all in my Google account.) My reasons for deleting contacts are 1) I know all the phone numbers of people I call and text most, and I don't want to lose this ability, and 2) I really don't appreciate that Google puts contacts on my phone who's number I've never been given and don't want. I don't want to accidentally send something or pocket dial a professional contact because Google put their number in my contacts.

I'm fine with Google having the numbers in my account, and as you said, it's good backup if anything happens to the phone. It doesn't bother me to add people manually online if it means I get to keep using my memory.

Thanks.