Sync contacts on Android to my.ooma.com not working properly

[pnmyers]

Hi,

I just signed up for Ooma residential service this weekend, and in the process of setting it up I tried to sync my contacts from my Android phone to my.ooma.com. I followed the instructions on https://my.ooma.com/phone/contacts when you click the "Import" link.

The instructions that come up when you click that link say:
1. Download the Ooma Home Phone app for iOS or Android and Login
2. On Android open the Menu, Profile and Choose Upload contacts to my.ooma.com
3. Select contacts that you want to upload and tap Upload Contacts

I used the double checkmark to select all contacts, and then tapped upload contacts. When I did this, it told me 16 contacts were uploaded. But... I have 600+ contacts total. It seems like it just stopped after 16, even though I selected all of them.

What I found is that if I repeat steps 2 and 3 above, it'll upload a few more, each time. It seems random as to how many it'll upload. Sometimes it is 0, sometimes 2 or 3 and sometimes 50. So far, I've repeated steps 2 and 3 approximately 40 times, and it's managed to get about 400 of my 600+ contacts uploaded.

This seems like a bug in the Android app.

I called customer support and reported this issue, and they have escalated this to their secondary technical support who are supposed to call me back in 24-48 hours. But, I wanted to report the issue here as well, in case anyone else is having the same issue. I'll update this when I hear back from technical support.

UPDATE 2025/01/07:

Customer service called me back as they said they would, but it appears they never escalated it to technical support.

I reproduced the problem on the call with the customer support agent, and after about 45 minutes they finally agreed it was an issue and they said again that they would escalate to technical support. I thought they did that when I originally called, but I guess they had not.

The weirdest thing about this is they said I had to reset my password and then read them the password over the phone, so that technical support could "log in as me" to attempt to reproduce the problem. This seems both very unsafe, and against many security best practices. So, I wanted to call it out here explicitly.

I did eventually concede and I reset my password and read it over the phone to the agent, as I was given no other option. So... now I am waiting for them to call me again in another 24-48 hours, so that I can resecure my account.

UPDATE 2025/01/10:

It has now been more than 48 hours since I unsecured my account and read my password over the phone to Ooma and they have not gotten back to me yet. I am going to re-secure my account because I was told that I would hear back in 48 hours and I have not heard anything.

UPDATE 2025/01/13:

Still no callback from Ooma Technical support. At this point I'm just going to assume that Ooma is not going to address the issue. So far, as a new customer, I'm not too impressed with Ooma customer service or technical support.

UPDATE 2025/01/15:

Ooma customer service reached out to me today asking if my problem was resolved. I told them no, it wasn't, because no one had ever followed up with me 24-48 hours following my call on the 7th.

That said, I did some additional testing to try to narrow down which contacts were causing sync issues in the Ooma Android app and I found two bugs in the Ooma app that need to be addressed:

1. If Telegram is installed, Ooma will show Telegram contacts in the list of Contacts alongside other phone contacts (like from Google Contacts). However, if you try to upload a Telegram Contact that does not have a corresponding Google Contact, it will fail. If you have many such contacts that exist in Telegram but not outside of Telegram, it is difficult to deselect them manually.

2. Ooma chose to limit the length of email addresses to 35 characters. If any of your selected contacts has an email address with more than 35 characters it will fail to upload and stop the sync process from completing.

For 1, I just ended up deleting all Telegram contacts that did not have corresponding Google Contacts.

For 2, there isn't a good solution here but I would suggest that Ooma just disable email syncing entirely because it really doesn't provide value for Caller ID anyhow. But if they insist on syncing email addresses, they need to increase the length of the email address field. While 36 characters is a bit on the long side for an email address, such email addresses do exist and are legitimate and breaking because of this arbitrary character limitation seems like a very odd design choice.

Thanks,

Perry

[Robek]

It could also be a bug with an Android app, rather than the Ooma app. Uploading contacts can get somewhat complicated, particularly if the source elements don't map cleanly to the target elements, or if the source and target define unique records differently. Maybe uploading them in smaller batches could help.

Users should assume that Ooma already has unfettered access to any information in their 'My Ooma' accounts. However, asking for passwords, (even temporary ones), is certainly not a best practice. Ooma should have their own test accounts (or test environments) to independently reproduce any problems.

Customer service seems reluctant to escalate issues to technical support, for whatever reasons. However, technical support is probably more focused on tracking and fixing bugs in the longer term, rather than managing individual incidents.

[pnmyers]

Thanks for the reply.

When you say that it could be a bug with an Android app, rather than the Ooma app, I'm a bit confused. The Ooma app is the Android app that I'm referring to here. I think the bug is in the Ooma Android app with the name "Home Phone", which is https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... ma.mobile2 on the Google Play Store.

I did try to upload in smaller batches, but the same behavior was observed even with smaller batches. The end result is that in order to sync 600 contacts, it would (on average) be required to perform probably about 100 individual sync operations.

Further, what I discovered in my conversation with support, is that you cannot sync more than once. If you do, it starts duplicating phone numbers on each contact that is 're-synced' and this would hit their limitation quickly for max number of phone numbers they allow. This duplication on re-sync seems like a bug as well, since it implies that you can only ever sync once, and that a re-sync has to involve first deleting all data on my.ooma.com.

In terms of the password, yes, I assumed that Ooma has access to all of my data. This fact is what made it all the more confusing as to why they needed my password. If they have access to my account and all of my data, why would they need my password at all?

I did ask them why they couldn't use a test account and they said that they couldn't reproduce the problem with their test account, and that does make sense. But, if the issue (as you mention) has to do with certain fields causing problems, then the only way to diagnose that would be to reproduce the problem on my phone (using my contact list) with some sort of debugging information to see when/where the sync breaks. Ooma using my password to install the Android App on their phone won't help because they'd be syncing their test contacts, not my contacts. I tried to explain this, to no avail, to the rep I spoke to...

I agree that technical support is focused on fixing bugs, but I think this is a bug. It's just a question of finding a reproducer that Ooma can see themselves. But without debugging capabilities in their app that'll be very hard for me to determine...

[pnmyers]

I think I figured out what the issue is.

The Ooma App is pulling contacts not just from Google Contacts but also from other apps that happen to have Contacts. I found this because there was a contact in the Ooma Contact list that was not in either my Google or Samsung Contact lists, and I went through every app to find out where it could possibly be pulling it from, and it turned out it was Telegram.

In the Ooma app, if I try to see the details of any of these contacts that it is pulling from Telegram it errors out and does not display the contact. So, it appears that the Android Ooma app is trying to retrieve contacts from Telegram but those contacts are not compatible with it and it can't process them (either to view details or to transfer to my.ooma.com).

Enabling or disabling contact sync in Android account settings does nothing to change this behavior, for what its worth. If a contact is BOTH in Google and in Telegram (same name, email, etc) then it appears to work fine.

So the issue seems to be with a subset of my contacts that are in Telegram only and are not in other Contacts lists on the phone.

[pnmyers]

I deleted all of my Telegram Contacts (in the Telegram Android App) that did not have a corresponding contact in Google Contacts, and this removed many issues that were causing sync failures. But it was still failing randomly.

I did some bifurcation testing to try to narrow down to specific records that were causing issues, and found a second problem.

Apparently Ooma has an email length limitation of 35 characters, and if you have an email address that exceeds 35 characters it will cause the sync to simply fail. I confirmed this by shortening one of my contacts longer email addresses to exactly 35 characters and it went from failing to uploading properly (albeit with the wrong email address).

I then tried to edit the contact to fix the email address directly in the my.ooma.com portal, and got an error message stating explicitly that there is a 35 character limitation.

Screenshot 2025-01-15 171915.png (3.83KiB)Viewed 347 times

These are legit email addresses, for what it's worth. Having a 35 character limitation for email addresses seems like an odd design choice, and having the sync silently fail with no explanation because of it seems like a usability issue/bug.

Especially given the fact that the email address is somewhat useless for what Ooma is using this data for. I would think that the only things that need to be uploaded to my.ooma.com for transfer to the Ooma hardware would be names and phone numbers. Syncing email addresses seems totally unnecessary.

[Robek]

"bug with an Android app" just meant "some incompatibility between the Ooma app and some other app that manages contacts, installed on the Android device". Other users have complained in the past that the Ooma app for Android is "buggier" than the Ooma app for iOS.

The emphasis on technical support's focus was supposed to be on the longer term; they may fix a bug in a future release, but not necessarily within a useful timeframe for the customer who reported the bug. For more detailed descriptions of multiple bugs, emailing Ooma would probably work better.

[pnmyers]

Ah, indeed. And it does appear that one of the bugs is between Ooma and pulling contacts from Telegram specifically. So you were right on that one, for sure.

And yeah, totally agreed. I'm not expecting the two bugs to be fixed immediately. But acknowledgement of the bug and agreeing to put it on a backlog would be a reasonable response.

I do have an email thread with Ooma in progress (and have since before I started this forum thread), but despite all of the info I've provided they have yet to either engage with technical support or even forward the information I've provided to technical support (as far as I can tell). Their last reply to me was simply "Are you still having the issue, we haven't heard from you in 7 days", and that was while I was explicitly waiting for a promised callback from them. <shrug>

[Robek]

That's definitely not the best customer service experience, but hopefully Ooma has enough information by now, to work on a bug fix. Users may still want to keep email addresses and other details in their Contact List though, even if that doesn't help with Caller ID, so the app should be able to upload them without breaking.