Migrating contacts from Android 1.x to Android 2.x

I'm finally getting around to upgrading my trusty old ​Android Dev Phone 1 from the original Android 1.5 firmware to ​Cyanogenmod 6.1. In doing so, I wanted to take my contacts with me. The contacts application changed its database schema from Android 1.x to Android 2.x, so I need to export/import. Android 2.x's contact application supports importing from VCard (.vcf) files. But Android 1.5's contact application doesn't have an export function.

So I wrote a minimal export tool​.

The Android 1.x contacts database is saved in /data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases/contacts.db which is a standard sqlite3 database. I wanted contact names and phone numbers and notes, but didn't care about any of the other fields. My export tool generates a minimalistic version of .vcf that the new contacts application understands.

Example usage: 

./contacts.py contacts.db > contacts.vcf
adb push contacts.vcf /sdcard/contacts.vcf

Then in the contacts application import from that file.

If you happen to have a need to export your contacts from an Android 1.x phone, this tool should give you a starting point. Note that the clean_data function fixes up some issues I had in my particular contact list, and might not be very applicable to a different data set. I'm not sure the labels ("Home", "Mobile", "Work", etc.) for the phone numbers are quite right, but then, they were already a mess in my original data. Since this was a one-off task, the code wasn't written for maintainability, and it'll probably do something awful to your data--use it at your own risk.

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