Annoying issue - contact numbers doubled up

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devnull10

Member
Joined
Nov 12, 2019
Messages
54
Location
UK
Car
C300D [2019]
I have an annoying problem with my contacts in my 2019 C Class. I have a Google Pixel 2 which is the only phone to ever have been paired with this car. If I press the steering wheel button and say "Call John Smith" then the COMMAND system responds "which line please?" - and shows the same phone number twice. This happens for all contacts, not just one. Now I definitely only have one entry in my phone per contact.
If I go into the telephone>contacts menu on the COMMAND system, I see the list of names - all looks fine - no duplicates there. However if I then click into a name I see their number twice.
I can only assume that the car has downloaded my address book from the phone, and is now displaying the number off both my phone AND the car. Clearly this isn't what you'd want it to do though!
Anyone have the same?
 
It's probably how your contacts are stored in the phone i.e. "phone" "google" "sim card" "sd card" or a combination of all of them. Maybe when pairing there was an option of what contacts to show.
 
They're only stored in a single place, which is Google contacts. Nothing on Sim or SD card
 
Do you have Whatsapp installed? It places duplicate entries for itself in each contact, which the car interprets to be 2 separate numbers.
 
Ah yes I do... Is there any workaround? That seems a bit of a flaw (either WhatsApp or Mercedes) - I'd imagine 99% of people use WhatsApp.
 
Ah yes I do... Is there any workaround? That seems a bit of a flaw (either WhatsApp or Mercedes) - I'd imagine 99% of people use WhatsApp.
What's WhatsApp? ;)
 
Ah yes I do... Is there any workaround? That seems a bit of a flaw (either WhatsApp or Mercedes) - I'd imagine 99% of people use WhatsApp.

Not that I'm aware of. It's sort of WhatsApp's fault, if they used the existing contact entry instead of insisting on duplicating the number as a 2nd entry this problem wouldn't exist. The car can only query the phonebook for entries, so it will get everything.

I don't know if the same problem exists running under iOS.
 
So i’m on IOS and use whatsapp, no double entries.
I would imagine android are allowing their own phone book to potentially make whatsapp calls from the contacts section instead of in app and causing the issue. Have a look at a contact and see if it gives you the choice to call vis whatsapp from the contacts app?
Sounds annoying, but admittedly even when I clearly state a name that I have only one contact with, it asks me for the line number anyway
 
For what its worth, I'm on Android, have WhatsApp, and no double entries are shown for me.
 
This has prompted me to do some deeper research. It appears the problem is specifically that if the number in your contacts list doesn't precisely match that shown in WhatsApp, the contacts app cannot reconcile the 2 (country codes are not a problem though).

A lot of my older numbers had hyphens stored in them by previous phones, so I've spent a few minutes in Google Contacts normalising them all. It also showed some duplicated numbers that were being suppressed by the contact list on the phone. We'll see if that works tonight on the way home.
 
It might be worthwhile deleting your phone from the system and redoing it to get the "corrected" address book?
 
It may be that somehow the numbers have become duplicated on the phone - ie stored on your normal email account but duplicated, say, on the phone SIM.
Most contact apps on the phone are clever enough to ignore duplicates, but Command probably isn’t, hence you’re seeing duplicates on the car.
One way to check this is to use a contacts app on the phone that allows you to display contacts for each particular source. The Samsung contacts app can do that, for example.
 
This has prompted me to do some deeper research. It appears the problem is specifically that if the number in your contacts list doesn't precisely match that shown in WhatsApp, the contacts app cannot reconcile the 2 (country codes are not a problem though).

A lot of my older numbers had hyphens stored in them by previous phones, so I've spent a few minutes in Google Contacts normalising them all. It also showed some duplicated numbers that were being suppressed by the contact list on the phone. We'll see if that works tonight on the way home.

Worked a treat.
 
It might be worthwhile deleting your phone from the system and redoing it to get the "corrected" address book?
This worked for me when I swapped my phone for mrs old iPhone despite deleting everything and restoring it as a new phone.

Weirdly it still showed her contacts and none of mine after completing a restore from iCloud.

Her phone had never been paired with my car but deleting and pairing again solved the problem.
 

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