It’s a contact problem

Who hasn’t been through the traumatising experience of transferring contact data from one machine to another? Or has lost all the contact information stored because of a mishap? Or has seen contacts turned completely upside down because of bad synchronisation with an online contact service that wasn’t well understood?

What could be simpler than an application that lets you store and manage names, telephone numbers and addresses? Contact applications, as they are usually called, are everywhere, most notably on smartphones and e-mail software (MS-Outlook, Gmail, etc.), be it online or locally kept on your computer’s hard disk. Despite its simplicity, its importance and its omnipresence, contact software remains to be perfected.

In principle most contact apps (or address books, to use another commonly used term for the same concept) are built on compatible structures and are able to exchange data and to synchronise between themselves. Indeed, the structure is simple. The fact is, however, that shortcomings and incompatibilities are overwhelming, often resulting in frustration and despair.

Problems are many and the consumer is left wondering why, after all these years and countless versions and improvements introduced by the industry, there isn’t today a straightforward, fool proof manner to manage contacts and keep them handy and secure, one that doesn’t require a degree in computer science.

The situation was already complicated because of inherent differences between operating systems. From MS-Windows to Android, and from mobile phones to online services, the road to contacts copying, sharing and exchanging has always been strewn with pitfalls. I still recall when, a couple of years ago, I tried to transfer my address book from a Nokia smartphone using Symbian system to a Samsung device running Android. I managed somehow in the end, but only because I am an IT professional by trade; a stubborn and a patient one what’s more. And even though, there were some imperfections in the resulting process that I had to correct manually.

Today, with the push to store, or at least to synchronise and back up your contacts in the cloud, the road is even a harder one. Not to mention those otherwise great communication apps like Whatsapp and Viber that want to synchronise with your address book in the background. Things can get pretty complicated.

Take an Android smartphone, the most widely used system in the world. IDC (International Data Corporation) figures updated on the fourth quarter of 2014 put Google’s Android at 78 per cent and Apple’s iOS at 20 per cent of the world market share for smartphone operating systems.

Contacts on an Android smartphone can be stored locally on the device, externally in the cloud, be synchronised between both, be linked to Whatsapp, Viber and Skype (welcome Microsoft…), or any combination thereof. Not lost yet? There’s more.

If you use a third party backup app to secure your contacts in case of crash, like for instance the excellent MyBackupPro by RerWare, or try to export the contacts to Excel so as to have an additional copy, you’d be surprised to see that your data isn’t exactly the same when you “bring it back” after a disaster. Of course the names and the numbers will be the same, but the organisation may be somewhat different.

Fields names for that matter may change. For example if you had a custom field named “Old Home Number” you may have something totally different after having restored your address book. If you had a specific ringtone or a nice photo-icon assigned to your best friend contact information in your address book, don’t expect this kind of information to be well preserved after a backup and restore operation.

When the IT world is able to deliver extremely complex, ingenious software applications of all kinds and that work beautifully, one cannot but wonder why there isn’t a contact app that takes proper care of all the aspects of the simplest of all database applications.