I have an LG V20, which is the third Android I have owned. Prior to these I had several iPhones over the years. Problem - and this is complicated: I have two sets of CONTACTS on the V 20, and I don't know how either of them got there. When I transferred content from my old V10, there they were.
One of them is a green and white icon and the other is the blue and white icon for Contacts seen in this forum. The "green icon" contacts app says that it is the SYSTEM app, and it cannot be uninstalled and reinstalled. The "blue icon" contacts app is apparently the official Google/Android app.
These are the problems I have been struggling with for months:
- The 'Green' set of contacts has many hundreds of copies of several of the individual contacts, which are the people with whom I communicate the most, and I have no idea why or how these copies are made. I certainly never added them more than once. And I can't get rid of them. They reappear, over and over, after I manually delete them. Thus glut of unnecessary contact duplicates totals several thousand, using up needed space.
- But the main problem is that this 'Green' set (the "system" set) of contacts has serious errors in how the contacts are identified, having somehow pulled content from various fields which are part of the contact's setup for that person -- i.e., it pulls content from the Notes field and the Address field, etc -- and scrambled it in with the person's name. And when I try to send an email to that person, that scrambled mess is what automatically appears in the 'To' field of the email. Example: 'Steven son Baker ICE1 Baker'. Obviously unacceptable, especially for my business contacts.
I have deleted these faulty names manually many times from the 'Green' list of contacts, and they keep coming back -- as if when the list syncs, it is syncing FROM a faulty master list that is stored somewhere and importing them back into my cleaned-up list, instead of the other way around.
Further, the Google email app on my phone defaults to the 'Green icon' set of contacts, instead of to the 'Blue' set which is supposedly the 'Google Contacts' app.
These same errors were also in the 'Blue icon' set of contacts, but I have manually deleted the faulty items in that set and they have not returned, so far. I AM ABLE to access the cleaned-up 'Blue' contacts list ONLY IF I use the Microsoft Outlook Mobile app. I cannot access the relatively clean Blue list from the Google email app, even though this is Google's contact list.
You might wonder why I don't just stop using the Google email app and stick to the Microsoft Outlook Mobile app. Even though the Microsoft Outlook Mobile app is generally superior to the Google email app in its final appearance (e.g., never skips several lines between paragraphs), the Outlook app occasionally has problems with certain kinds of messages -- such as refusing to send some attached image files, sometimes refusing to save to draft on the phone and never saving to draft back to my laptop, etc.
So . . . how do I permanently delete the content in the grossly faulty 'system contacts app' (the 'Green' icon app) so that I can import the relatively clean Google/Android contacts list into the systems app?
I should perhaps mention that both of my email accounts/addresses are gmail accounts attached to the company I own. And also, it is significant (I think) that I have NONE of these problems with either the contacts or the email functions on my laptop computer, which is Microsoft Outlook. I am sorry for the detail here, but it is a complex issue, and it's driving me crazy. Any help would be very much appreciated.
