vCard sent to my Android shows up as text

Question

A friend sent me a couple of contacts via vCard mms. I received them as text messages, with for example the contact avatar rendered as plain text and some of the characters replaced with android emoticons. I could dig the relevant info out of the text message, but I would like to simply import it as a contact to save doing that tedious process. If I press and hold on the text, I get option to save the email or the phone but it is just scraping the text - not properly importing the vcard format.

Is there an easy way to import the contact? (note: for something so simple as this, I would not really be interested in a paid app)

My friend was using iPhone 4. I am on Galaxy Nexus.

Answer 1

I found some encoding issues when dealing with vCards, but generally, I was able to open any vCard file with the native contact manager application, have you tried to open the file with your computer?

The vCard is a text format file, so the image is encoded in Base64 (characters) if you open any vCard with a notepad, you will be able to see the contact picture encoded with characters.

This is a sample vCard:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
N:Anders;Maria
FN:Maria Anders
ORG:Alfreds Futterkiste
TEL;TYPE=WORK:030-0074321
NOTE:Very Funny!
END:VCARD

So... To give you an answer, Android should handle vCards natively, without any special configuration. I'm running Android 4.x as well, and it works as expected.

In my opinion, the issue is about how iPhone encodes the vCard.

You can try downloading this vCard file: I's been tested on many Android devices

Answer 2

This finally worked for me: I was texted a vcf card from an Iphone to my Galaxy S4. Downloaded it, went to device storage. Where is that? Open apps, click on MY Files, Downloads. Voila! Check which file you want, or just tap it. Opens a screen cancel or save. Save to device. Search contacts for name, there it is in contacts!

Answer 3

Even nowdays (2015) there are many devices that have MMS/SMS vCard builtin, but there are quite a lot of them that does not support this feature. When I switched from Nokia to Android (Galaxy Nexus) I was quite surprised that I was not able to receive even SMS vCards...

So I've been working on this topic for few years since 2012 and I've created an app that solves the problem. Even though you are not interested in paid app, you can give it a try. Here is a link to FREE version, that has some limitations, but maybe you'll find it worth the paid version upgrade.

bizCard Manager FREE/vCard