Outlook App for Android does not sync contacts

Stated it multiple times, beginning with the 2nd sentence.  “Each time I ensured Contacts sync is enabled in both Outlook account settings (off by default) and Android Settings\Accounts (on by default).”. While I certainly appreciate people trying to help, please read before you reply.  You are wasting people’s time who will read this in the future not to mention my time now.

You may not have noticed but I listed having already done all of these steps.  And more.

I recently bought an Android Samsung Note 9 and was having similar contact sync issues. All my Contacts are in my personal Hotmail/Outlook and it wasn't being sync'd. I have my business contacts in my business Outlook, which is Office 365. Then I have my personal contacts in my personal Outlook - which is a Hotmail account.

After spending an hour I found the issue and why my personal contacts were not syncing to my Android phone Samsung note 9.

1. Go to your Outlook app
2. Select on the hamburger menu top left
3. Select Settings wheel
4. Select your personal email/outlook (((obviously if you don't see it, then you need to click on "Add Account" and add your personal/outlook email)))
5. Enable sync contacts

Voila - your contacts from outlook will start to download immediately

If you want to set personal/outlook as the default, go to your people app, click on the hamburger menu, go to manage contacts and go to default storage location to make personal/outlook as your default contacts.

Michaelslive...I have had this EXACT same issue.

My main bugbear was that contacts from my office 365 account would not sync with the android contacts, or would intermittently, but only 3 or 24 or so would sync, then it would just stop syncing, then the contacts would just plain disappear from my contacts list.

I found some interesting information and gave it a go and it seems to be working at the moment...

A lot of my contacts on my outlook office 365 account had "categories".  I deleted all of the category information, and voila, all of a sudden, after resetting the account on my phone and clearing the cache for the outlook app and contacts app, the contacts start showing up in the android contacts list.

So, steps for me were...

1. Open Outlook on my PC and go to contacts list
2. Delete all "category" information from my contacts in the list
3. Open android phone settings>apps>...then clear cache for Outlook and Contacts
4. Open outlook app on phone and reset account in the settings screen, then turn on sync contacts in the same menu
5. Open android contacts and ensure that Outlook is ticked in the drop down menu for the list that you want to display

I am just a user, and I finally figured a work around that works for me.

My situation: I have over 600+ contacts in outlook (when you sign in through online), but the android contacts get dropped every time Outlook pushes an update, and leaves about 100+ contacts on the phone and some of these contacts have incomplete information.

What worked for me:

First go to outlook online, open a contact and do a dummy edit of a contact - this is to mark the contact as dirty and marking it to sync.

1. Open the contacts app and check the number of contacts. Then close contacts app on android (9.x)
2. Open the outlook application on your phone.
3. Select the search/magnify icon at the bottom. This should open the contacts list as a horizontal list. swipe/scroll all to the right till you see "see all contacts". This will list possibly all your contacts - which is good, but don't worry if you do not see them.
4. If you see a contact in this list but not in your address book, select this contact. Edit it and it should prompt you for a sync. Sync it. All contacts will sync is a bit.
5. If you get a sync error, then choose another name/contact that is on your android phone, edit it. The phone will come up with a message it is syncing. All contacts will sync in a bit.
6. Re-open the contact list and check number of contacts - this should now reflect the correct count.

Note: This has worked for me, but I had to follow these steps in this sequence. Not guaranteeing it will work for all, but the whole trick is to mark the two environments as out of sync. Forcing the sync has no effect if the system does not think they are out of sync. The problem is traceable to every android outlook update, and generally messes it up - dropping all contacts that are currently used by your phone - texts, phone logs, WhatsApp shared contacts, etc. You get the picture.