Weird New Phonebook Issue
 

This is a new one on me and I'm hoping someone else has seen it. My wife and I just upgraded our phones to new Pixel 2's, for every Android phone before this the MMI has correctly imported the phonebooks on both our 2015 Q5 and S4. With the new phone it imports but there is an important difference. Let's say I have a contact with 3 phone numbers, a cell, home and work. Our previous phones would show that as one contact with 3 distinct phone numbers and the appropriate icon in the MMI. Now with the new phones it shows the contact 3 times each with the generic icon. The problem with this is if I say call "John Doe" I see 3 John Doe's and have no clue which phone # is which.

Obviously the issue is with the new phones but I'm at a total loss what to even attempt to change to fix this. Any ideas?

Thanks

JM-
I don't recall the specifics of the problem (something to do with varying phone books formats) but what you are experiencing is not uncommon. A friend of mine has a different German car with the same issue, and the workaround is to enter "John Home Doe" "John Cell Doe" "John Work Doe" etc. in the phone book, yes, as multiple entries.
Since you did not have this issue with your older Android phones, you might try sending feedback to the Evil Empire (Gargoyle) and letting them know the kids left programming camp too soon. Once again. They've got a habit of releasing unpolished software with glitches like that. They can fix it. Until then...you have to make multiple entries.

Sounds like the version of Android on the Pixel 2 incorrectly sends a contact with multiple phone numbers as separate contacts with one phone number each over Bluetooth. This would be a bug of the phone, unless there is a setting to deliberately do this. Don't know why one would want it this way, except maybe if you sync with a system that has a limit of phone numbers per contact.

Thanks for the replies, I've done more experimenting and it's clearly not an option but a change (bug) in the format they are now using. I will open a ticket with Google but I figure there is maybe a 1% chance they do something or even acknowledge it.

Just in case anyone else stumbles on this thread I thought I would post an update. Unfortunately I never found a solution with our 2015 Q5 & S4, so we did the only logical thing you can do when a phone doesn't work properly with a car. Get rid of the cars! Just kidding (well kind of), for reasons completely unrelated to the phone issue we upgraded both cars to a 2018 SQ5 and a 2018 A5 Sportback. The phonebook DOES properly download and format in the newest MMI, so while Google clearly broke something that worked before it just be a change to a format that the Audi engineers knew was coming and made work with the new MMI.

"so we did the only logical thing you can do when a phone doesn't work properly with a car. Get rid of the cars!"
Yeah, that's exactly what my AT&T rep said to do!
But since I don't always trust AT&T, I called Google and Sergei said that I should go to the Google Play Store and order some proper Google semi-autonomous cars instead. And he was right! The new Google *cars* even remind me when I'm overdue on placing calls to wish someone happy birthday, they seem to know everything about who and when and how I need to make every call.

(Larry, Sergei, please call your mothers, they are looking for you!)

For prefacelift there is a gateway firmware 0121 (8T0907468___0121.sgo ) which was released in 03/2017. I could not find the TPI but I believe it fixes long names bug with the phonebook. There is also a new gateway firmware for 2017 model produced at the same period, I found the 2017 model gateway TPI on the internet stating the phonebook issue I described before.

So if there is a bug the cure will be flashing to newest gateway firmware. I have installed recently gateway firmware 0121 but flashed firmware with my own tools.