Phone Link not showing Contact Names....again

I use an Android phone and the problem for me turned out to be Google Contacts syncing was turned off.

On your phone check:

Settings>Google>Settings for Google apps>Google Contacts Sync>Also sync device contacts

It's weird you know, on at least two occasions this week, I've run the app to see my phone contacts displaying on my messages - then, not more than ten minutes later, they're gone... definitely a bug. It was working really well for so long. Never had an issue with in Windows 10, and I was a heavy user of it.

I was able to fix this on my computer by following these steps:

1. In the Phone Link app on PC, go to Settings, click the My Devices tab, and use the ellipsis (...) menu on your device to remove it, then close the app.
2. On your phone (mine is an Android), go to Settings, Apps, Link to Windows, Open, then remove your PC from the Linked Computers section.
3. Restart your phone.
4. Re-link the phone and PC by restarting the Phone Link app on your PC and following the step to add your device.
5. Perhaps this is the critical thing, but I noticed in the Link to Windows app on Android, there is a toggle to "Sync contacts" under the list of Linked Computers, which was disabled for me. Turn this on.

Contacts are showing up again for me now - yay!

Stop with this ****. I tried this at least 10 times.. It is OK for a few days... but after that phone companion only start showing numbers.. after a few days it "repair" itself just for a few days...

Whatever you do, do NOT turn on the contact sync option on the Link to Windows app on your android-phone. I did that mistake a few weeks ago. At first, I got the contact names back in Your Phone-app on my PC, and I was very happy.

But today, all my conctacts disappeared from my android phone. I then discovered that Phone link had duplicated my 100+ contacts to 12 000 contacts in outlook.com. Some contacts are duplicated several hundered of times. They are all categorized under the lable "Pixel 4 - Synced by Link to windows". Total madness, total disaster.

And you can't delete them - if you select more than one in the outlook.com contacts list, the delete button dims out. Also, some duplicate contacts don't allow for deletion.

This is just unreal. I have now idea how to get rid of these.

This also worked for me. I'll keep monitoring to see if it stops.

One thing I'll point out regarding the "Sync Contacts" toggle. I noticed late last year my contacts in Outlook.com had over 1000 duplicate entries, always just the cell number and nothing else from my original contacts. I noticed a category in my contact list I hadn't created called "Pixel 6 Pro (contacts synced by Link to Windows)" that was filled with all the duplicates. There's no way to easily delete them, I had to go through one-by-one.

I turned the sync option off and it seemed to have helped. But I'm noticing now that they're being created again with "contacts synced by Link to Windows" as the category in all the duplicates.