Copy a single gmail contact to phone

Question

In my contacts, I generally display only contacts stored on my phone.

(My gmail contacts include practically everyone I've ever sent an email to. They're nice for auto-completing the recipient when I compose mail, but I don't want to see them when trying to find someone in the contacts list on my phone.)

However, here and there I find a gmail contact I'd like to be on my phone. How do I copy a single contact to my phone? I've seen ways to export them all, but I don't want to do that.

Answer 1

You can do this by moving your contact to the SIM-card and then to the phone.

On android 7 the workflow is like this:

1. Make sure your Google contacts are synced to the phone.
2. In Contacts settings display contacts from all accounts.
3. Find the contact you want to copy.
4. Copy it to your SIM-card.
5. Select the new contact on the SIM-card.
6. Copy it to phone memory.
7. (optional) Select the new contact on the SIM-card and delete.
8. In Contacts settings display only contacts stored in phone memory (or phone memory and SIM if you prefer that).

I think I remember that on older phones you could just move the contact around without going through the copy-and-delete madness -- not sure if that's the case for Kitkat.

There are some contact attributes that can't be stored on the SIM-card. Not sure which these are but that probably includes photos and the like. Anyways, phone numbers and e-mail addresses will always be copied.