Contacts disappear if Google sync turned off per Sammobile

[BJB]

According to this article in Sammobile, a new version of Google play services deletes contacts if Google contact sync is turned off. It is not clear what happens if you never turned sync on while this new version is installed.

[/url]https://www.sammobile.com/news/google-account-contacts-may-disappear-from-samsung-phone/

It seems like this is an issue for MPE users that don't sync their contacts to Google?
Google may think they are synced as they exist on the hone but they are not as MPE put them there?

BJB

[dvhttn]

Firstly don't sync your contacts with Google ever.
Secondly, use a local account to sync your contacts with MPE from your PC and there is no problem .....

[BJB]

Firstly don't sync your contacts with Google ever.
Secondly, use a local account to sync your contacts with MPE from your PC and there is no problem .....

Thanks. Understand. I am just pointing it out because if someone turns on google contacts sync by mistake (for example when turning on bookmark syncing on chrome or something) and then turns it off. If this happens, it would be quite a surprise.

I always thought having a cloud backup of contacts is not a bad idea, but understand it can create issues so never have.

Thanks,
BJB

[FJ]

MyPhoneExplorer should check at least if he tries to sync a Google-Account and Google Account sync is turned off. Many thanks for this information, i will care about this with the next update

[BJB]

Thanks. I guess if all the contacts from a phone disappear because of this, and MPE is setup to sync both ways (say between phone and outlook) it should see nothing on phone, but all thecontacts on outlook and copy them to phone during the sync. Unless it thinks the phone is the most current update due to google changing some status date/time that MPE uses. If this ever happened to me, I would just change the sync to force outlook to copy to phone but some users might now know to do that.

I know this is a separate issue but I always thought it would be an awesome feature for MPE to co-exist with google backup/sync of contacts and calendar somehow. So you could backup both to cloud with direct google sync and also use MPE to sync to outlook locally.

Thanks for a great product!
BJB

[xmh]

... a new version of Google play services deletes contacts if Google contact sync is turned off...

Thank you for reporting this issue. I experience this behavior on a HTC10 (6 years old) upgraded with Lineage19 (Android 12). No Google account, no Google Play framework, no Google Sync services and Netguard firewall installed. Thanks to this thread I discovered that Contacts sync was activated then as Google sync is missing all my contacts disappear, I had to restore them every day with MPE and I didn't know why.
I found the culprit in Password and Account system settings and in Contacts settings.
Hope that my issue is solved now

[BJB]

As I was looking at my notifications on my S23+ today I saw one that said something like "Google syncing 1xxx contacts" and a progress bar! I did NOT turn it on and immediately went to it and turned if off. Then I was like, "should I have done that?!" I can guarantee I did not turn this on.

Anyway I immediately ran an MPE sync which syncs to my desktop outlook.
I saw the usual add a few contacts from phone. And then I saw that 45 contacts would be "edited". These are contacts I did not do anything with so perhaps MPE saw that google "touched these", maybe changed the file date or something. It didn't change any data (the phone and outlook data was identical in the sync box) and my MPE sync worked.

However it looks like Google did something that seems to almost flip this on automatically. My sense is at some future point it will do this again.....and if it completes and we then turn it off, we may have an issue. So if it syncs, and I never add/change anything on the google website, and only edit or add contacts on the phone, perhaps MPE will still sync OK....

It almost seems like google sync is forcing MPE to co-exist.

BJB

[xmh]

I'm running latest MPE nightly (2023.07.02) and the reset of my Contacts database remains, it seems to occur around midnight.

Then I will try to:
- fully disable internet on mobile (both WiFi and 4G)
- restore the Contacts with MPE.
- uninstall MPE client (currently 2.7.beta1)
- check if the Contacts remains a couple of days.

[FJ]

@xmh: Are we talking about contacts from your Google account or were they in the local contact account of the phone?

[xmh]

@xmh: Are we talking about contacts from your Google account or were they in the local contact account of the phone?

Hello FJ, sorry for the delay, I've no Google account. I talk about local phone contact account.
It seems solved now. But I confess that the lineage Rom I'm using is not 100% stable.
I store more than 800 contacts and about all of them have an associated picture. Phonebook.dat size is currently 360kB. Sometimes it happened that all pictures disappeared after refreshing an empty database. Not anymore.