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I am playing around with my brand new Motorola Defy and trying to find a way to manage my contacts. Of course it synced every contact in my Google account... I want to hide some of them, you know, those people you don't contact often but whose coordinates you want to keep in case you ever need to. I haven't had any luck so far.

I have 3 apps on my phone that deal with contacts :

  • one called Contacts that is just for managing contacts (no tabs like dial or favorites) -- you can call someone after selecting them, then selecting the phone number, then call -- in there I can select groups I want to hide but too many clicks to call someone
  • the dialer (my phone is in French so it's called "Appeler" = Call) with tabs : call, recent, contacts, favorites -- works as I'd want to but display all contacts with a phone number, and I haven't find a way to hide some groups (and it does display "visibility: hidden" when you select the contact)
  • Go contacts, that I installed in hope it would be everything I wanted, but I can't hide groups, as when I try remove a group from the app it deletes it from Google

I don't know if the 2 apps that came bundled with my phone (contacts and dialer) are stock Android or Motorola. BTW, I skipped the configuration of Motoblur so no Motoblur account or anything like that. And it's running Froyo (already installed when I got it).

Does anyone have a solution for me ?

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2 Answers 2

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I can't speak specifically to the Defy, but if you've got the stock Android Contacts app and you're syncing to Google, you can tell the phone which groups to display.

From the Contacts app Menu | Display options | {account}. Then check the groups you want to see, and the uncheck the ones you don't. "My Contacts" is going to be pretty much everything under your account. If memory serves, this is only for display; the contact info is still on the phone.

Please note that in Android versions 5.x and up this may be no longer valid due to a bug.

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  • Thank you for your answer, sorry it took me so long to reply. However, I had already tried that and it didn't change what contacts were displayed in dialer.
    – Anne-Laure
    Jul 22, 2011 at 10:35
  • This worked for me on Samsung Galaxy S2. Perfect solution, as I didn't want to have to add any new applications to handle this. +1.
    – Questioner
    Jan 17, 2012 at 5:33
  • The answer does not work. This is a bug in Android and still not fixed in both 5.x and 6.0. SE question regarding 6.0, and bug report
    – Ela782
    Dec 12, 2015 at 23:26
  • @Ela782: Considering upwards of 70% of current Android devices are using versions prior to Android 5.0 this answer is still relevant.Consider also that when this question was asked and answered Lollipop was still quite far away. Still and all, I will change it to note that it may not be valid for more recent versions.
    – ale
    Dec 15, 2015 at 0:21
  • @AlE.: The thing is your answer never worked for most devices. It was always a bug in Android, since 4.x or possibly even earlier. It may work for specific vendor-devices but not in general. I'm not saying your answer is bad, it isn't, it works in some limited cases, I'm just adding a comment with additional information that this is a bug in Android and for most devices (including 4.x) has no solution currently. It helps people like me stop looking for a solution when there is none because it's a bug in the OS!
    – Ela782
    Dec 15, 2015 at 15:06
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I found Dialer One which works exactly how I want : display in the contact list only the groups I want to display, with a big phone icon on the right to initiate the call.

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