How To Delete All Contacts Without Phone Number

If you use an Android phone and you have hundreds or thousands of contacts in your contact list, but a majority of them are saved in your contacts without phone number – and now you want to get rid of them, then this is the correct instruction for you.

ONLY FOR ANDROID USERS

If you just came from Google it is very likely that you are facing the same problem I faced when I wrote this short instruction. I had thousands of contacts in my contact list. Most of them I didn’t have close contact with. And most of them were saved without their telephone number. I wanted a cleaner contact list on my phone. I wanted only people with a phone numer in my contacts.

Why Do You Have a Contact List Full of Contacts Without a Phone Number?

If you ask yourself why your contact list is full of people you don’t have a phone number from, this is the reason:

Your contact list has been synced with other services in the past. How is this possible? You did grant Google and other applications the permission to do so. It was probably one of these popups you simply agreed to, without really knowng what it meant. Outlook, LinkedIn, and Facebook are probably the biggest reason for it. In my case it was LinkedIn.

However, this is all possible because you use Android. Some years (or decades) ago, contacts and phone numbers were saved on your SIM card or locally on your phone. Nowadays, new contacts you save are usually saved in your Google account. In some rare cases it might be e.g. your Samsung account. If you grant another application the permission to sync the contact list, all contacts are saved in your Google account. But for whatever reason we did grant this permission, let’s focus of getting rid of all those dead contacts.

Deleting Contacts Without Phone Numbers

Before you start deleting all contacts manually on your phone, here is a faster way to do so.

What do you need? The fastest way to clean your contact list is to access your Google Contact list in the web browser on your desktop or laptop. To do so, simply go to: https://contacts.google.com

In your Google Contact list, you can clearly see the contacts with and without E-Mail adress:

Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to sort the table according to phone number. But you can now mass select them by using the Shift key and a (left) click:

Now you can delete all selected contacts by clicking on the three-dotted- vertical icon and “Delete” (here it’s German “Löschen”):

This process is definetly a multitude faster than doing it all manually in your phone’s contact app.

I hope you found this helpful!

You found a faster way to do it? Please leave a comment below to help everyone and I’ll update my blog post accordingly with proper credit.