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Android export all contacts

Upgrading your phone or purchasing a new device can be an issue sometimes for people who have hundreds of contacts where simply re-creating them all one by one is not feasible.

Here is how you can export all of your internally stored contacts to an external storage or a Google account

Export all contact to SD card.

Follow these steps to export your contacts:

  1. Open the Contacts app (on some devices, such as the Moto X, it may be labeled People)
  2. Tap the app's menu button (this will either be the device menu button, such as with the Samsung Galaxy S4, or the overflow menu, which is denoted by three vertical dots)
  3. Tap Import/Export
  4. Tap Export to SD card (if an SD card does not exist, tap Export to USB storage)

This transfers all your contacts to the SD card in your phone and upon placing the SD card in your new phone you can follow the same process but select import rather than export to import all of your contacts to the new device.

An alternate method of transferring your contacts is to sync them to a google account on your device, this will then be synced to an account on any device rather than just one device.

Export all contacts to Google

Syncing your contacts:

Your contacts are automatically synced when you first turn on your phone and sign into a Google Account, so make sure to add your Google Account to your Android device. Any existing contacts from that account are synced with your device.
After that, all your contacts automatically stay in sync, whether you make changes on your phone, from another device, or from any Web browser. The contact information on your device is also available in Gmail, Google Talk, Messenger, Phone, and other apps where it's useful. As you add contacts from different sources, they are synced automatically across all the places you need them.

Since contacts are automatically synced, if you delete a Google contact from your device, it will also be deleted from Google Contacts, which will also remove it from other places, such as Google Chat.

Author: Anthony Baldwin