[Android General] Ardalista:
Something that has been bugging me is the way Facebook and Google don't play nicely when it comes to contact syncing.

In the past it wasn't really a big issue as I only used one device and everything just sync'd in the background, now as I prefer to manage all of my contacts via the gmail contacts page, rather than via my phone I set about trying to figure out how I could get both Gmail and Facebook contacts to sync to my Google account.

I tried a few of the tools available, such as ubersync, contacts+ and haxsync, these all do a great job of mixing your Facebook contacts in with your gmail contacts on your device, but they are still treated as seperate when syncing back up to gmail.

I found a way to get around this by using Google's sync along with haxsync and a bit of dirty ol manipulation, and I thought I'd share it if others are wanting to do the same. I take no responsibility if you mess things up, so if you are not confident then make sure you make backups before you start.

Also before you start just realise you will loose any group sorting you may have done but this can be edited again via the gmail contacts pagee quite easily)

First of all, sync all the gmail contacts into your android device from google.

Install Haxsync from the Google Play store (contacts+ and ubersync may give the same results)

Goto advanced settings for haxsync and set things up the way you want (I selected to have the htcdata backup entry put into the notes field, but this is optional)

now sync with haxsync to get all the facebook details and wait for the haxsync to finish.

Now you have all the data into your device if you look at an entry you might see some of the users data is listed under the google account, and other parts are listed under the haxsync account. From here on only the google data will sync back up to google.

Now to perform some manipulation

Go to settings on your android device(s) and disable syncing for both Google and haxsync. (note I said device(s) this means disable sync on all other device you might have that also sync to Google)

Go into People on your main Android device and export your contacts to storage, this will make a vcf file on the Android device containing all of the data for each person (minus the account it's associated with)

On the android device(s) go to settings - applications - contacts storage and clear data- (remember to do this for all android device syncing to google)

load gmail in your web browser on your PC, go to contacts, select them all and delete them.

Now go back into People on the Android device and import the data you saved to your storage.

You will now see you have merged the data that was previously seperated by the gmail and haxsync accounts

Go back into settings on the Android device and re-enable sync for gmail.

Wait for this to finish.

once your device has synced with Google again go into gmail and select contacts

On the left of the page look under 'other contacts' select all of them and choose add to My Contacts.

Now go up to My Contacts and you can start sorting everyone into different groups again if you wish.

Now you have synced both gmail and Facebook information into your gmail account which will flow down to any other Android devices you have.

If you add more people on Facebook and want their data in gmail, you'd have to repeat this process again.

If you decide to re-enable Haxsync again you may need to manually join some of your contacts in your phone again, such as where friends also have Google+ and Facebook accounts under different names.

It's not perfect but if you have 100's of contacts / friends it saves a lot of manual data entry saving everything into gmail.

Good luck and have fun.