iPhone Android Autosync (is bad!)

[padams35]

My wife got a cheap droid as a work phone. It immediately synced up with the iPhone. Contacts, text messages, phone calls... which mostly defeated the point of having a separate work phone.

I think the root cause was using a the same gmail email on both phones (because she was ok with checking email on the work phone... she just wanted a separation on all phone number related activity). I just never dreamed apple/samsung devices would be so user friendly by default without so much as an opt-in (or that there would be no obvious opt-out!)

Has anyone seen similar behavior, and found a solution to prevent bleed over?

The only solution I can think of is to factory reset the droid and create a new email to set it up, but that would cause us to loose all work related contacts that have been added and mean one more set of email/passwords to memorize.

 

[ericwn]

Don’t use the same Google accounts for business and private life and nothing will sync from them.

 

[eyoungren]

My wife got a cheap droid as a work phone. It immediately synced up with the iPhone. Contacts, text messages, phone calls... which mostly defeated the point of having a separate work phone.

I think the root cause was using a the same gmail email on both phones (because she was ok with checking email on the work phone... she just wanted a separation on all phone number related activity). I just never dreamed apple/samsung devices would be so user friendly by default without so much as an opt-in (or that there would be no obvious opt-out!)

Has anyone seen similar behavior, and found a solution to prevent bleed over?

The only solution I can think of is to factory reset the droid and create a new email to set it up, but that would cause us to loose all work related contacts that have been added and mean one more set of email/passwords to memorize.

Make a new Gmail account specifically for her work and transfer just the contacts over to that email account. You can co to contacts.google.com (in her old account) and export from there. Log out, log in to the new email accounts and go back to contacts.google.com. Import the contacts file you just exported.

Then use that Gmail account on her Android.

Note. If her contacts list is not long then she can export selected contacts only (you can select the ones you want when using the browser at contacts.google.com). This way she doesn't capture non-work related contacts.

Unfortunately, on her iPhone, she'll have to weed out the work contacts on her original gmail account. That's best done, again in the browser, at contacts.google.com. Her iPhone will eventually resync the contacts and they'll be gone off her iPhone.

My wife also has an Android for work (her old Pixel).