Adamya Sharma / Android Authority
TL;DR
- The Android Settings app is preparing to add a new “Contacts storage” page.
- This page lets you choose which online account you want your contacts to be saved to.
- Alternatively, you can disable contact syncing entirely and only save new contacts to your device.
If you don’t back up your Android phone, you’re at risk of losing a lot of valuable personal data. Your apps, files, photos, videos, and contact info could be gone in the blink of an eye. Android already makes it easy to back up a lot of this data, but it seems Google wants to make it even easier to back up your contacts in the next quarterly release of Android 15.
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Android has long supported saving your contact data in a database stored locally on your phone or tablet. Access to this database is guarded by the aptly named READ_CONTACTS and WRITE_CONTACTS permissions, which are runtime permissions that you have to manually grant to apps. Many messaging apps request access to these permissions so they can find out whether any of your existing contacts have accounts on their platform, as well as associate new contacts with existing accounts on their platform.
You probably have a lot of apps reading and writing to your phone’s contacts database at any given time, which is why it’s really important that at least one of those apps backs up the database so it can be restored later. If you use an app like Google Contacts, then you’ve already gotten that taken care of, but if you don’t, then your contacts won’t transfer over when you switch to a new Android phone.
To make it even easier to back up your device’s contacts, Google is preparing to add a new Contacts storage page under Settings > Apps in Android 15 QPR2. While digging through Android 15 QPR2 Beta 1, I uncovered strings that reference this new page, which will contain toggles to choose which account to sync contacts to, a button to add an account, and a toggle to disable contact syncing entirely.
Code
<string name="contacts_storage_device_only_preference_label">Device only</string> <string name="contacts_storage_device_only_preference_summary">"New contacts won't be synced with an account"</string> <string name="contacts_storage_first_time_add_account_message">Add an account to get started</string> <string name="contacts_storage_no_account_set">No default set</string> <string name="contacts_storage_selection_message">Contacts will be saved to your device and synced to your account by default</string> <string name="contacts_storage_settings_title">Contacts storage</string>
With a bit of tinkering, I managed to surface the new Contacts storage page, as shown below.
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
Besides making it easier to choose which account to backup your contacts to, I’m not sure what else the Contacts storage page does. Currently, apps like Google Contacts already make it really easy to back up your contacts, so it’s hard to imagine many users having trouble with that. Plus, Android’s account settings also already provide a way to disable contact syncing, so I’m not sure why this new page is really needed. It’s possible this new Contacts storage page in Android 15 QPR2 serves some bigger purpose that we’re not seeing yet, so hopefully Google shares some details about it when it goes live.
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