Contact Sync Bug makes Phone Integration Useless

[jcrigler]

First I want to say I am not a Rivian basher. I love my Adventure Quad R1S. As I tell all my friends it's the best car I have owned., BUT the phone integration really is terrible. CarPlay or Android auto isn't the solution, the solution is to fix the bugs with the current set up. Here is why phone integration is useless for my use case:

Most of my trips are less than 20 minutes... to the grocery store or hardware store or up the road to the gym. I get in my car with my iPhone which has about 3000 contacts. That's probably more than a lot of folks have, but I am a retired businessman with years of contacts I have kept up with since I used a Palm Pilot.

Every time I enter the car it wants to upload my contacts... It takes 15 minutes to do that, at best. Often I think it get's stuck, but I don't really know because I get to my destination before the contacts upload. If I leave the car and my iPhone in it and do my shopping I come back to the car and my contacts are there.... but if I take my phone on my errand, we repeat the whole process on the drive home.

So basically the contacts functionality is useless. This is a BUG. The system should upload contacts once, and prompt the user to re-sync if new contacts are added or deleted from the phone. It's ridiculous to do a fresh upload every time you enter the car with your phone.

Either Rivian should fix this with a software update, or admit it needs to add CarPlay or Android Auto. But what it has today is not a workable alternative.

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[Donald Stanfield]

Wow, that's a lot of contacts. I have a couple hundred, and they sync almost instantly. I think your unique situation might be the issue, but in that case, they should have some ability to store information. Even if you needed a SSD in the USB port, it can hold music too while we are at it and it would make a ton of people happy.

 

[jcrigler]

yea, I know I have a lot of contacts... but the point is I should be able to get in my car, press the phone icon, see my contacts and my favorites, and make a call. NOT wait for contacts to be uploaded. If I've recently added a contact and it's not in the car yet, that is understandable. So then I would press a "sync" button" if there was one. But waiting 20 minutes to call my sister, who has been in my contacts for 20 years, and is on my favorites list.... just makes me angry.

 

[HaveBlue]

I also have thousands of contacts spread across five phone books. If it makes you feel better, my Audi is also worthless for the first 5-10 minites of driving. It runs qns (basically blackberry OS). So I'm used to this in the rivian. I stopped syncing one phonebook with about 800 contacts that I don't use regularly and that helped.

 

[SoCal Rob]

First I want to say I am not a Rivian basher. I love my Adventure Quad R1S. As I tell all my friends it's the best car I have owned., BUT the phone integration really is terrible. CarPlay or Android auto isn't the solution, the solution is to fix the bugs with the current set up. Here is why phone integration is useless for my use case:

Most of my trips are less than 20 minutes... to the grocery store or hardware store or up the road to the gym. I get in my car with my iPhone which has about 3000 contacts. That's probably more than a lot of folks have, but I am a retired businessman with years of contacts I have kept up with since I used a Palm Pilot.

Every time I enter the car it wants to upload my contacts... It takes 15 minutes to do that, at best. Often I think it get's stuck, but I don't really know because I get to my destination before the contacts upload. If I leave the car and my iPhone in it and do my shopping I come back to the car and my contacts are there.... but if I take my phone on my errand, we repeat the whole process on the drive home.

So basically the contacts functionality is useless. This is a BUG. The system should upload contacts once, and prompt the user to re-sync if new contacts are added or deleted from the phone. It's ridiculous to do a fresh upload every time you enter the car with your phone.

Either Rivian should fix this with a software update, or admit it needs to add CarPlay or Android Auto. But what it has today is not a workable alternative.

Have you considered enabling Hey Siri (or just plain Siri now)? Then you can say, “Hey Siri, call Pat Smith, work.” or “Siri, call my mom, mobile.”
edit:typo / clarity

 

[Rivian Owner]

Unless Rivian has told you something different, 2000 contacts is not a lot of data in today's world; unless you have some other data attached to each contact that is bloating the dataset. Most likely you have something else going on as it should take just a few seconds to transfer your contact data set. Can you load a different phone with your contacts and see if you have the same issue on a different phone? I'd also try using the Rivian as a hotspot with a couple of different devices to see if the wireless in the Rivian is working the same for several different devices. Can you go to a SC and sync your contacts with a demo Rivian to see if you get the same results? Since you are, I presume, working with wireless devices, there may be some problem that is slowing your data connection?

 

[dstraede]

I have the same issue with 1,700 contacts. It can take longer than my drive to sync them. There is no need to sync them over and over. How about a button that says SYNC CONTACTS that we can push every now and then? I feel like the onboard computer that syncs contacts and music saves nothing after the car goes to sleep (30 minutes). Every music service starts over. I tell Alexa to resume music or Tidal to Spotify to play a list or station, and it starts from the first song. After months of repeatedly hearing the same music, I gave up and now stream XM from my cell phone. Of course, it does not know how to start independently, but at least when I press play, it is new music.

 

[FooF]

I would guess all those years of exporting and importing your contacts has resulted in some contacts that are corrupted. I fixed this many years ago when I was having some problems by exporting your contacts and open in excel. The messed up contacts were pretty obvious when you look at them in a spreadsheet.

 

[jcrigler]

I have the same issue with 1,700 contacts. It can take longer than my drive to sync them. There is no need to sync them over and over. How about a button that says SYNC CONTACTS that we can push every now and then? I feel like the onboard computer that syncs contacts and music saves nothing after the car goes to sleep (30 minutes). Every music service starts over. I tell Alexa to resume music or Tidal to Spotify to play a list or station, and it starts from the first song. After months of repeatedly hearing the same music, I gave up and now stream XM from my cell phone. Of course, it does not know how to start independently, but at least when I press play, it is new music.

I totally agree. The Car seems to have no memory. It resyncs the contacts when nothing has changed, and it does forget what you have listened to on any of the conect+ stuff.
I really think this is just a software bug that should be addressed in an update. For Contacts, for example, all their software needs to do is store a timestamp of the last updated date of the contacts file. If, when you get in the car and bluetooth connects to your phone, the car send a query to the phone for the last updated date. If it's newer, then update/sync contacts. If not then just show what you have already downloaded. Not exactly software rocket science,

 

[jcrigler]

I would guess all those years of exporting and importing your contacts has resulted in some contacts that are corrupted. I fixed this many years ago when I was having some problems by exporting your contacts and open in excel. The messed up contacts were pretty obvious when you look at them in a spreadsheet.

I actually cleaned all my contacts just like you recommended. I exported them when I traded in my last iPhone and re-installed them manually on my new phone, /so, in my particular case I don't think it's that. there is something else going on....

 

[FamDocDon]

Agree that contact sync is a problem. And I can't seem to get Siri to respond in my R1T. Not sure what I'm doing wrong.

 

[ElmTree]

Wow, that's a lot of contacts. I have a couple hundred, and they sync almost instantly. I think your unique situation might be the issue, but in that case, they should have some ability to store information. Even if you needed a SSD in the USB port, it can hold music too while we are at it and it would make a ton of people happy.

 

[ElmTree]

I have the same problem. 3000 contacts and 5-35min to load every time car starts. Is theee a fix? Rivian supports wants me to drive to service center as mobile support is over 2 months backed up.
I fear they have no solution. Any tips?

 

[FamDocDon]

It's always curious to me that once I start to type in someone's actual number, it shows up on the screen, suggesting that things are being saved somewhere. The bug seems to be in that it automatically defaults to the sync screen.

 

[jcrigler]

My vehicle got an OTA update last night. I haven't checked the details on what was fixed.... but I noticed with pleasure that my contacts showed up immediately when I drove off this morning. I wonder if this has been fixed. I will check again tomorrow and post to this thread.

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