Solve Contacts not Syncing to Gmail Problem in Android

Today morning, I was looking for a simple way to backup Android Contacts without using any app or service. I figured out that Google syncs your phone’s contacts automatically to your Gmail account. But it syncs only those contacts which you have saved as Gmail contact not the contacts which you saved as Phone Contact. Here is how you can Solve Contacts not syncing to Gmail problem in Android.

How to Sync all contacts to Gmail?

• Go to Settings > Accounts > Google > Make sure that sync is turned on for your Gmail Account.
• Once Sync is turned on. Google will try to sync your phone contacts to Gmail and Gmail contacts to phone. But it will only sync the Gmail contacts to phone. Now here is Why: You have saved all your contacts in the phone as ‘Phone Contacts’ not as ‘Gmail Contacts’ or Google Contacts.
• Now you want to sync all your phone contacts to Gmail. The procedure is damn easy for KitKat and Lollipop devices.

Devices running Android KitKat and Lollipop.

• Go to Contacts > Options > Export / Backup Contacts and select your Gmail account.
• It will sync all your contacts to Gmail.
• You can go and check whether the contacts has been synced or not. Here: www.google.com/contacts.

For Devices running Jellybean and earlier versions of Android

Now if your device don’t have an option to Export / Backup Contacts directly to Gmail then instead of adding Contacts one by one, you can do a simple workaround here.

• Export / Backup your contacts to Internal Storage / Memory Card.
• Make sure you have the .vcf file with you.
• Once you have the file with you on your Internal Storage or Memory Card. Delete all your contacts. Yes, you heard it right. Delete all of them.
• Now go to Contacts > Options > Import Contacts > Memory Card > Select your Google Account > Select the .vcf file > OK.
• It will import all your contacts to your Google Account and sync it with your phone.

Go to Google Contacts to check, whether your contacts has been synced or not. It will take sometime, if you have many contacts. I had 187, it took less than 10 seconds to sync. Speed of sync also depends on your Internet Connection speed.

Gmail contacts sync problem is solved now. From now on, save new contacts as Google Contacts to automatically sync them to your Gmail account. Also make sure that Auto sync is enabled for Google account (can be accessed – Settings >> Accounts).