Question I added a second Gmail to my Razr Plus 2024, and now my contacts and message PFPs are showing their info. Is there a way to reverse this?

[04ijordan]

Long story short, I added a family member’s Gmail account to my phone just to log into a few restaurant-themed apps. After that, I noticed that my Messages and Contacts got completely messed up — it pulled in all their contacts and messages, including ones from their old phone.

Now my contact names are changed, there are extra contacts I don’t know, and it’s just a huge mess. I tried turning off sync under Passwords, Passkeys, and the Account section in System Settings, but that didn’t help. My profile picture still shows in the top right corner of Messages and Contacts that's the only thing that remains, but it seems like the other account is still affecting things.

Is there a way to reverse this and get my phone back to normal?

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Open the Contacts app, then look at the upper left, under the contacts search bar. Do you see a dropdown that says "All contacts"? If so, tap that, and then select only your account. Does that clear things up a bit?

 

[04ijordan]

Welcome to Android Central! Open the Contacts app, then look at the upper left, under the contacts search bar. Do you see a dropdown that says "All contacts"? If so, tap that, and then select only your account. Does that clear things up a bit?

Thank you, that fixed it for the phone app, the messages app is still acting off though, so maybe it takes a while to update the contact names and photos. I asked this question on Reddit but didn't get a response. I guess people thought it was a stupid question, but I just recently got this new phone after having an iPhone for the longest time, so I'm still learning how to work it, so thank you for your advice.

 

[B. Diddy]

If you want to use another family member's account for a specific app, then just log into the app using their account -- no need to add their Google account to the phone as a whole. Adding their Google account to your phone at the system level can lead to syncing a lot (if not all) of their Google account information to your phone (like contacts, Gmail, text messages, photos, etc.)

 

[spARTacus]

On Samsung, I'm not sure if one can add a gmail account for Samsung Email app, for example, without it also being added as a device google account. Rather annoying.

 

[B. Diddy]

On Samsung, I'm not sure if one can add a gmail account for Samsung Email app, for example, without it also being added as a device google account. Rather annoying.

That's true -- I was thinking more of 3rd party apps like Facebook, Instagram, etc.

 

[mustang7757]

Usually if you go to the phones settings>accounts and back up>go to manage accounts and select the one you don't want to sync and turn off the options, seen in my screenshot.

 

[spARTacus]

Yup, there's that degree of control over how the phone uses a google account it may be aware of. However, such control is limited. For example, there doesn't seem to be a way to prevent google apps (youTube for example) from picking up and latching onto any/all google accounts on the phone. One can't even stay signed out of youTube anymore. The youTube signout help basically indicates the google account needs to be deleted from the phone. However, then the app just picks up a next google account from the device and there doesn't seem to be a way to control such.

My guess is when the OP added their friend's gmail account, the phone also added it as a google account (even though it probably shouldn't have and instead should have just added another gmail account for email), and then messages app also latched onto that added google account. For some, the tight and seamless google integration is too tight and starts working against what some users would like.