Saturday, August 19, 2017

Never trust the cloud!

Story1: I thought saving my contacts on the cloud with Google synchronization would be better than keeping them locally on my phone and risking missing them if the device is lost.

Some of the contacts were duplicated due to communicating with them via many Google services (on the same account) like Gmail, Hangout, Google Talk. And because Google is not smart enough to combine them, I manually merged them into single accounts.

All of a sudden, 2 months ago, Google decided to kill one these services completely, which was Google Talk. What consequences do you expect from such move? We said Google is not smart at all..

The day the service was shut down, all my contacts that was merged with Google Talk accounts, all of them went away! I suddenly started finding many call logs and new calls from people I know showing only their mobile numbers without any associated names!

This took me a while with so many speculations and cursing Android till I found out non-revertible root cause and made the link with this such stupid Google move! But thankfully I could manually retrieve a bunch of these lost contacts by getting their names from our Whatsapp communications.

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Story2: I had some contacts whom I call via both phone and Skype, so it came natural to synchronize these contacts, again for not having so many duplicates, and to have one contact card for each person having all his details.

But we all know that any product Microsoft acquires must be ruined and bugginess has to be one of its new natures; Skype is no exception. So the unstable mobile app is one thing I had to accept. But that was not only related to calls and voice quality.

Again, all of a sudden, I discovered that many contacts disappeared. Numbers without names. And also I spent a while to make the link that all these contacts were Skype ones!

Skype was not uninstalled or in need for an update. Just the session was in trouble at it automatically signed out. This was enough for it to make the contacts disappear and to be physically removed from my address book!

It took days to just accepts signing in again! But luckily I could retrieve many contacts and save them locally, with the help of Whatsapp too.

So, damn you Google and Microsoft! And thanks Whatsapp, but I still won't give my number to your parent Facebook or synchronize contacts with your brother Messenger!