Google Contacts can make adding contacts to other accounts difficult (APK teardown)

Stock photo of Phone by Google app on phone next to phone calendar and pen 2

Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority

TL; DR

Google appears to be making a change to the Contacts app.
When you save a contact, you no longer have the option to choose which Google account or device it is saved to.
You can still use ‘move to another account’ to move a contact to another account.

If you want to add a new contact in the Google Contacts app, there’s a nice handy feature that lets you choose where to save that contact. Unfortunately, it looks like the Android app may take away this feature in the future.

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A MOT disassembly helps predict features that may appear on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, such predicted features may not make it to a public release.

Currently in Google Contacts there is a “Save to” section that is below the Save button and above the input fields. Tapping “Save to” will open a list where you can choose to save your new contact to a specific Google account or device.

However, in version 4.42.26.682057806 of the Google Contacts app, we noticed that this option is now missing. The left screenshot above shows the old behavior and the screenshot on the right is the new behavior. It is unclear whether this change is intentional.

In the screenshots below you can see the contact creation page expanded. The leftmost image shows the old behavior, while the two on the right show the new behavior. Although the “Save to” section is gone, you’ll notice that it now says “Save to (Google Account)” at the bottom of the page.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t save to other accounts or devices. However, for this you will have to use a different method. It looks like you can still use ‘Move to another account’ to move a contact to another Google account or device.

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