vCard .vcf import into Simple Contacts Pro messes up groups

[svdb0]

After exporting the contacts from Simple Contacts to a .vcf file, and importing the result in Simple Contacts Pro 6.22.2, contacts end up in the wrong groups.

It seems that the groups themselves are mixed up; all contacts from an exported group end up in a single group, but the latter is (usually) the wrong group.

When inspecting the .vcf file that was exported from Simple Contacts, the CATEGORIES inside the BEGIN:VCARD [...] END:VCARD seems to be correct. This suggests that the problem is in the importing, not the exporting.

When re-exporting the imported contacts from Simple Contacts Pro, the resulting .vcf file has duplicated contacts; some contacts have no category at all, while some have the wrong category.

[tibbi]

groups arent handled at all at .vcf files

[svdb0]

I'm not sure I understand.
After I imported a .vcf file, groups were created which weren't there before, and these groups contained (the wrong) contacts.
It looks like these groups are stored as 'categories' in the .vcf file.

Perhaps the incorrect behavior comes from an interaction with Google's own contacts storage.
I have now deleted all contacts, both in Google's Contacts app, and in Simple Contacts Pro.
Then I forcefully stopped Simple Contacts Pro, and cleared its internal storage.
After importing the .vcf file, using my Google account as the contact source (as I did before), now the groups are recreated, with now the correct contacts in the correct groups.

So that solves the problem for me personally, but there's definitely some issue here.

Note that before, I had also tried clearing Simple Contacts Pro's internal storage (without deleting them first), and I had also tried deleting the contacts from Google's Contacts app — I think both at once. I still ran into the problem.
Perhaps deleting the contacts first from Simple Contacts Pro affected something in Google's contacts storage, or perhaps there is some nondeterministic behavior here.

[svdb0]

So I've done a lot more testing, and I can't reproduce the original issue.
Some ideas:

• At the time, my phone had a low battery charge, and was in low battery mode, running slower. Perhaps this makes the occurrence of race conditions more likely, or it could change how various processes interleave.
• I originally had some contacts in the phone's local storage, in addition to those associated with my Google account. I tried recreating them, but could not reproduce the issue.
• At some point during my attempts to get my contacts imported correctly, some default categories (like 'Family', 'Work') turned up. I did not use them, and they were not visible in Simple Contacts Free or Pro. I don't know what app created them, but I did delete them before the import which was finally successful.
• In the 'Import Contacts' dialog, I had pressed the 'OK' button multiple times. The import dialog remained present and functional after I pressed this button, without any indication that the import was (still) running in the background, leaving me wondering whether the import had started at all. Perhaps as a result there were multiple imports running at the same time. I have not been able to reproduce the issue in this way though.

Regarding the duplicate contacts: I have found out that this is due to the WhatsApp contacts. Apparently, even though they relate to the same person, they are exported separately. And when they are re-imported, they are seen as normal contacts.
This does not happen with the free version of Simple Contacts.
Also, if you import the exact same contacts more than once, they are not deduplicated. I will create a separate issue for this.