Android and Google Contacts - Address Incompatibility
By @edent
· address address book android blackberry contacts · 250 words · read ~608 times.
I'm in the process of moving all my contacts from BlackBerry to Android. I've been moving contacts from phone to phone for close to 10 years - but I've never found a problem like this.
Getting my contacts from BlackBerry to Google was simple. I exported a VCF of all my contacts from Outlook and imported them to Google. Simplicity. Everything worked. Syncing back to Android was easy - input Google account and password and hey-presto. But that's where it all broke down.
The address seems to be stored correctly. Right?
Wrong!
When we go in to edit, rather than "Address", "City", "Postcode" fields - Google just gives us a plain text field. 
What Happens In Android? 
At first glance, everything looks correctly formatted. But let's go in and see how the data is represented within the address book. 
As you can see - everything is represented on just one line.
We can edit it correctly on the phone to look like this. 
Well, that's a bit off effort (especially with over 500 contacts).
How does it look back at Google Contacts on the web?
Recap
It's the year 2010. We can't even synchronise addresses correctly without mangling them along the way. I sometimes think it would be easier to outsource my address book to Indian and have minimum wage labour ensure all entries are correct and up-to-date.
