How to get rid of duplicates in my telephone agenda?

Question

After installing Skype a week ago, my telephone agenda duplicated a lot of contacts, for many of them I have seven duplicates - therefore eight entries for each contact.

After installing WhatsApp, I had this problem too - many contacts had one duplicate. But after installing Skype, the telephone agenda is a horrible mess. For each such contact, Skype added five or six more duplicated contacts.

I tried to delete one such duplicated contact and I got the message "This contact is read-only. It can't be deleted, but you can hide it." - and below this message I get the buttons "Hide" and "Delete", but I tried the "Delete" button and it works, so it actually can be deleted! Which is really inconsistent.

So the question is: how can I get rid of all those duplicate contacts? (without having to delete them manually, one by one, of course)

On other phones, you can access WhatsApp from the main contact, it doesn't have to be duplicated in order to send a WhatsApp message from the main telephone contacts list.

My phone is Honor 7s.

The Android version is 8.1.0

I am using the Nova Launcher but it acts the same with the Huawei Home launcher too.

Answer 1

The Skype duplicating contacts has been an issue for me and searching a solution in Google shows that the problem has existed for about 10 years, why the Skype developers can't resolve this is odd.

To try and reduce the problem then I left sync contacts off in Skype and never synced them, but still had many duplicates of the default phone sim entries i.e. customer services etc.

I've just found a method that has resolved the issue and all duplicates in my contacts (caused by Skype) have now vanished. The solution is to deny Skype access to the phone's contacts, you can still use contacts in Skype and add them there, even use Skype from a phone number link in a text file.

To deny Skype access to the phone's contacts (I'm using Android 10), then go to it's 'App info' page and select 'Permissions', select 'Contacts' and the deny option. I also Force stopped the App, cleared the cache and opened it again, all of which seem to speed-up the process of removing the duplicates.

To be able to update / sync my Skype contacts with the phone's contacts (could still be useful at times), then I'll temporarily allow access to contacts again, use the sync contacts in Skype, once done then disabled it and deny permissions again to avoid the duplicates re-appearing.

I've noticed after trying the above to temporarily sync my Skype contacts is that Skype just shows those contacts to invite and with the option in the address book of calling the number via Skype, all of which can be done directly with Skype and so I'll now leave it in deny access to the phone's contacts.

I had the contact duplicating issue on a previous phone as well running Android 6. In my case the issue is that Skype mainly duplicates contact entries from the phone sim card. I did remove the sim contacts but there are some permanent service entries there and so it had been duplicating those with over 10 entries for each. Great to see that the duplication has now stopped after denying Skype access to the contacts as per the details above.

Answer 2

in the contacts app, untick the "whatsapp, skype, etc.." from the "contacts to display" options, select "customize" and done!