How to remove duplicate contacts in Android

It happens to the best of us; no matter how organized we try and be, we can never seem to prevent the duplication of contacts on our device. This could be because someone has changed numbers and rather than update, we simply save the new number as *Name of Contact* New for example.

Well we are here to try and prevent or cure this little pesky problem, which might not cause much issue for the most part but it is annoying, makes your contact list look messy and can cause you to message an old number.

The Old Fashioned Way

First of all we’ll look at the old fashioned way of doing things, which involves a lot of tapping and manual searching but can be perfect if there are only a few duplicates lingering in your contact list. This method is by no means the most productive way of removing multiple contacts but it’s a good place to start.

• Open up your “contacts” list from within your phone.

• Hold down on a contact until it is highlighted.

• Tap the three dots in the top right hand corner.

• Tap “Delete”.

If you don’t want to delete the contact, you could simply tap on it and then edit it accordingly from within that individual contact. This isn’t efficient if you have 50 duplicates though.

Google Contacts

The second method you can adopt is that of utilizing Google Contacts. For this you’re best going onto a browser on your laptop or computer. Open up your Gmail account and then on the left hand side there will be a drop down menu by clicking on the word “Gmail”.

• Click on “Contacts”.

• You’ll be shown a whole list of all of your contacts registered on your device.

• Tap on the three dots for more options.

From here you’ll have a bit more freedom and it’ll just generally be quicker to work through your list of contacts. You can delete, edit or even hide them from your contact list by clicking on the appropriate option.

Using An App

Lastly you can use an app designed for the sole purpose of cleaning up your contact list. We’ve supplied one at the bottom of this article although there are multiple ones available that you can try out if you don’t get on with Simpler. It’s so simple to accomplish. All you have to do is open and run the app, it will cross reference all of the contacts on your device and then give you a list of all the ones which could be deemed as a duplicate. You can then pick and choose which is or isn’t a duplicate and remove them as needed.