Android automatically fetches contacts from various sources such as your Gmail account, Facebook profile and other online accounts including Yahoo and Skype etc.
Also sometimes you save same contacts multiple times of same person with different numbers. This results in duplicate contact entries on your Android smartphone or tablet. In such cases you can join similar contacts to cleanup your address book.
This can be done easily by following a few simple steps given here:
- Scroll your address book until you find a duplicate contact. (Most duplicate entries are kept near to each other and you can locate them easily.)
- Select any one of the duplicate contact.
- Touch ‘Action Overflow’ or ‘Menu’ icon and select either the ‘Join’ or ‘Link Contact’ option. (You might need to edit the contact first and then use these options i.e. ‘Action Overflow’ or ‘Menu’ icon to easily find the command.)
- Select the command and you will be presented with a list of contacts that Android finds to be same. (It also shows you the entire list of contacts, just in-case software’s guess is incorrect.)
- Find the duplicate contact and select a matching contact in the list to combine them both.
- Once contacts are merged, they will start to appear as a single long entry in your address book.
Joint contacts can be easily identified, all joined contacts looks like single contact but are long entries, usually displaying two sources from where the contact’s details are fetched.