Facebook contacts not syncing

Facebook has made the decision to only sync contacts with 'useful contact information'. If any of your Facebook friends do not have any contact details, they will NOT be synced to your phone's contacts.

If you are unhappy with Facebook's decision, please feed it back to them by using the 'reporting a problem' option on the app.

Clerberson's post explains why this is happening.

Basically, your device only retrieves Facebook contacts that have relevant contact information on their Facebook profile.

Nothing is broken, it's just a change to the way your device retrieves information.

The reason this is happening is because of Facebook's decision, and many people are unhappy about it. Not only that, after making this decision they failed to communicate it to their customers!

this is so stupid..i found a "sort-of" fix to this though.. doing this will only link the contact to their facebook account.. it'll add their profile picture as their contact image HOWEVER, DOB doesnt show.. wonder why... hmm :/

ok so heres what you do

go to contacts

Add new contact

fill in the name (same as facebook)

phone numbers and other fields

and then, on the homepage field fill in their facebook profile link

save

then go to settings

facebook

update all contacts

and then the contact should have a link to his/her respective fb accounts

Thanks YOtshay, i've tried it for a few contacts but indeed it does sync the profile pics. It works on all my devices automatically (iPod, iPad and Macbook). But its tedious work for only syncing the picture. I've filed a complaint in the FB app not sure what effect this will have but there is little more we can do...

I disagree with all of you that say this is a Facebook issue. I have an iphone 5 and it worked fine with mine. Then my mother recently got an iphone 5 and its not working on hers. Her does act more like where she only has a few people's birthdays and does not have anyone's in our immidiet family. I am sure there is a fix for this please someone help.

Dammit Facebook, I only asked for a dislike button, not to change your contact system!

Why change something it was working great?

That's why I'm a conservative 😉

Hello! This is not working for me! The contacts do not synch! Is this still working for you guys? Thanks!!

There seems to be a new issue I've noticed over the last few days. From what I can tell, now the only contacts that sync are ones who have verified their mobile numbers with FB. The few contacts I had showing since FB changed their policy (noted above), have now disappeared. I made one come back by having them verify their number.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Yes. This is irritating. Contacts are automatically getting deleted from my list. Is it a way where FB wants to force us to provide our mobile numbers?

Common Apple, do something!

I have a friend with his phone number, birthday, website (but not additional email other than @facebook.com) in his contact information on his facebook profile and still he's not showing in my contacts list.

I also added one person manually with the same name as it appears on facebook and added his number, did "Update Contacts" from the facebook app settings menu. Still it wouldn't sync!

There's something wrong here... There seems to be a bug, not only a change in some policy!

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/sync-birthday-event-iphone-cal/

If you want your FB friends to be synced on your iphone just because of their birthdays, Just follow this. very useful 🙂

Great solution - thanks.

This is BS... If they wanted to help us Facebook would/should have created an option to NOT SYNC conntacts with irrelevant data, not just stop doing it all to gether...

Well I guess this is the world we live in, where others make decision on how we use/view our own personal data...

Thanks for wasting several hours of my time trying to fix this issue on my iPad/Mac Facebook.

I just did some testing and got it to work. Add the personal email of your friend manually to your contacts, then re-sync in Settings-->Facebook. I imagine this would have to be the email the person uses to log in.

To me, this makes sense. The Facebook app would need some kind of unique identifier to do contact look-ups when syncing. It makes sense that it would be their email address and/or phone number. A lot of users are not comfortable putting their mobile on Facebook (even though they can hide it...), but they all have emails! And if you don't know your friend's email ...why are you friends? 😝