How can I set a default contact for a phone number?

Question

In my contact list I have a number of contacts that share the same home phone, because they are family members. For instance:

• my mother
• my father
• my brother
• the family's house

I keep the home phone number for each contact so that when I want to speak to one of them, I can choose the contact and then where to try to reach them. I keep a separate contact for the house so that I can call there when I don't want to talk to anybody specific.

When anybody calls from the family home phone, I want the phone to display the family house contact, not anybody in particular. Is there any way to specify that a phone number has a default contact?

Answer 1

New contacts are added to the internal contactslist at the bottom.

They are displayed in the way you want: FirstName/LastName or LastName/FirstName.

When you are called by the family's House then the phonenumber is searched in the internal contactslist and returns the first match found.

What you have to do is: Make sure that the family's house is the first contact te be found. You can't do this by changing it to another name, because that doesn't change the order of the internal contactslist.

One way to do it is: Export all your contacts and edit the .vcf file so that the family's house is above all other contacts. Erase the contacts in your phone and import the edited file.

Another way is to erase all your contacts and type them in by hand, but make sure the family's house is before the other contacts with the same phonenumber.

You must actually do this with all contacts that are not one person, but multiple persons (i.e. Father and Mother) or a place (such as the family's house).

Answer 2

I solved this problem by renaming the contact that gets listed when I receive the call. In other words, one of my colleagues was listed each time I received a call from Work instead of listing "Work Landline", so I edited that colleague's contact info to be named "Work Landline" and then I created a new contact for that person. This achieves exactly what Fred described, but may take less work depending on your situation.

The downside to this is that you may need a call in your log to determine which contact to edit.

More explicitly, here is what I did (note that you can do 3 and 4 from your phone instead of the web and then you don't need #5):

1. Called my mobile phone from my work landline
2. Identified the contact that was displayed (our office manager)
3. Used Google Contacts website to change the name of my office manager to "Work Landline"
4. Used Google Contacts website to create a new contact with my office manager's name.
5. Waited for my contacts to sync to my phone.
6. As a final confirmation, I looked in my call log and saw that my office manager's name had been replaced with "Work Landline"

Answer 3

Sure, just open a contact, and long press the number that you want to make as a default contact, then choose default contact

(actual words may differ according to the ROM you are using and the contact application, but the way to do it, at least in the standard Android is this)