It’s the first time I have an Android phone. I thougth that years of Android development was going to offer me anything I want. I thought that all the people concerned by their privacy on their phone have already provided workarounds to flee Google servers. I was wrong.

Some days ago, I wanted to sync all my contacts to my OwnCloud server.

After a few researches, I found that I could use the CardDAV facilities from OwnCloud to sync my contacts to my phone, via an application. Great ! But how can I send my existing contacts to OwnCloud ?

Android separates the intern contacts and the “synced” contacts and I couldn’t find the command to say “hey, copy all the existing contacts for syncing”. I couldn’t use bluetooth to send my contacts because my computer does not have a bluetooth adaptator. I don’t have a memory card to transfer all my contacts. I can’t figure out how to dump the contacts from the phone via USB. I don’t want to sync to Google to be able to download all my contacts and send them back to OwnCloud.

Argh, why is it so complicated to sync my existing contacts to OwnCloud ?

Here is how I did it.