HOW TO REMOVE DUPLICATE CONTACTS IN ANDROID



Having duplicate contacts makes things inconvenient for you, leading you to do some silly mistakes you would hardly do if your contacts were single and not duplicate. An example of such mistake is when you want to send a text message to a friend, you might mistakenly send the text to a wrong number saved with that friends name or maybe to a wrong person altogether. Well, you might not know the implications of duplicating contacts until you make that silly mistake of contacting the wrong person.




Without wasting much time, let’s delve into the steps you’ll need. You should note that getting rid of duplicate contacts is easy and not a magic. Even if you are a novice, you can do it yourself. Over time, as an android user, you have installed several apps some of which may want to use your contacts in carrying out their specific functions. For this reason, these apps may end up creating duplicate contacts for you on your smartphone. In order to get rid of these duplicate contacts, here are some useful tips:

1.       From your smartphones contacts:  Yes, your smartphones contact book should be where to initially remove duplicate contacts. The type of settings your smartphones manufacturer set as default for your android device varies and this you should take note of before proceeding to remove your duplicate contacts because the settings varies. Well, for stock android lollipop, what you should do is to tap on contact after which you should tap on the edit icon which by default is the symbol of a pen. Then Tap on the trash icon and it will be deleted.
For example, if you have a contact, (let’s say Sarah) saved as an email address and the same contact saved with a mobile number, you can link both the email and the phone of the contact (in our own case ‘Sarah’) together. To do this, that is to link the contacts together, navigate to edit contacts screen, tap on the ‘more’ menu which is represented with three dots (vertical). Then tap join and it is over to you to pick a contact to merge (in our own case, merging Sarah mobile number and Sarah email address together).
It is of great importance to also note that android makes such as Sense, TouchWiz etc. share a common feature with android lollipop, which is they can be used for locating and deleting duplicate contacts. If you are using a Samsung smartphone, browse for the link icon that is located next to the ‘connected via label’ which you will likely find on the contacts page. Once located, you can use it to link two contacts formats together.

2.       Use of special app: Managing of contacts has been made easier with various apps that are dedicated for this purpose. You can always search Google for these apps because there are a lot of them out there. However, to save you the stress, we recommend simple mergeduplicates. This app works similarly to Google merge contact tool (which we will discuss next) that comes with Gmail on the internet.
To use this app, launch it and watch as it arranges the contacts of your smartphone and presents a neat count of best matches using details and names as a criterion. It’s now left for you to choose which contact you want to view before accepting.

3.       Using Gmail on your browser: It is advisable to control your Google contacts from the internet; why? Accessing it from the web gives you an edge over other methods, providing more options for you. When logged into Gmail, click on the drop down menu located at the top left corner of your inbox, and then you should select contacts from your list and view your contacts. After this, click on the link that says ‘find duplicates’ and Google will search for different contacts that have some details in common such as phone numbers, names, etc. Click merge when the results appear to compile a selected group of contacts cards. You can alternatively select the contacts manually from the main list using the tick boxes you see, and then you can compile them together or delete them using the appropriate icon you see at the top.





Finally, we have come to the end and its over to you now. If you know of any method used to remove duplicate contacts in android, please share it here.
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