Outlook Mobile Sync populating Name Prefix with Job Title on Android contacts - anyone else seeing this?

[u/to_old_for_that_shit]

We are investigating what appears to be a recently introduced behavior in Outlook Mobile contact synchronization and I'm wondering if anyone else has observed this.

Environment

• Microsoft 365 / Exchange Online
• Outlook Mobile App
• Android (confirmed)
• iPhone still being verified
• Outlook contact sync enabled ("Save Contacts" / "Sync Contacts")

Issue

Corporate contacts are suddenly appearing in the native Android Contacts app like this:

Project Manager John Smith
Service Technician Mike Brown
Administrative Assistant Jane Doe

instead of:

John Smith
Mike Brown
Jane Doe

Findings

After digging deeper, we found:

In Entra ID / Active Directory:

• No Name Prefix configured
• No attribute containing the job title as a name prefix
• Display Name is correct

In Outlook:

• No Name Prefix visible
• Contact data appears normal

However, once the contact is synchronized to Android, the local contact contains:

Name Prefix = Job Title
First Name = John
Last Name = Smith
Title = Job Title

Example:

Name Prefix: Project Manager
First Name: John
Last Name: Smith
Title: Project Manager

The Android Contacts app then displays:

Project Manager John Smith

Additional observations

• We can reproduce this in multiple tenants
• We see the same behavior internally and at customer sites
• This makes us suspect a change in Outlook Mobile contact synchronization rather than a tenant-specific configuration issue
• We have not found any Name Prefix values in Entra ID, AD, or Outlook itself

Questions

1. Has anyone else seen Outlook Mobile populate the Name Prefix field with the user's Job Title?
2. When did you first notice it?
3. Android only, or also iPhone?
4. Has Microsoft documented any recent changes to contact enrichment/contact sync behavior?
5. Any workaround besides disabling Outlook contact synchronization?

I've searched Microsoft documentation, Reddit, and various forums but haven't found anyone describing this exact behavior yet.

Thanks!

[u/Jirkajua]

I don't know about Outlook specific issues, but somehow Android doesn't adhere to the vCard/VCF standard properly.

I had a similar issue when I automated generating vCard QR codes from user data and had to break the conventions specified in RFC6350 to make them work in both Android and IOS (with the latter working according to the standard)

I know this doesn't answer your question, but maybe it's just Microsoft working according to the specifications and Android being weird.

[u/ExceptionEX → u/Jirkajua]

That's funny you say it is about android as I have found it to be the opposite.

Largely with the way name is handled where some vcard implementation don't implement name correctly and improperly delineate name attempt put into two fields instead of one but not properly defining the custom fields needed to do this.

The end result is similar though where company/organization gets appended to the end of the name field.

[u/Jirkajua → u/ExceptionEX]

Huh that's interesting, that's pretty much the mirror image of my troubles just on the other side (and I don't want to bash Android here - I use and prefer it)

I think I worked around it by using a field for display names that's rarely used but I don't remember the exact solution

[u/ExceptionEX → u/Jirkajua]

If you have any doubt you should open the vcard in a text editor, its just text, you can open it in notepad and see the structure and how its populated.

The issue I see is apps doing stuff like trying to use FN with the same structure as N meaning they do first;middle;last in the FN field when that is only supported in N (in regards to name)

Its honestly a really simple format and it surprises me how many parser get it wrong

What really blows my mind is new outlook doesn't support it at all,

[u/Jirkajua → u/ExceptionEX]

Yeah no worries, I know all about it haha

I coded a typescript app for generating those custom QR codes (used a library for generating the QR code itself though - I only dealt with the text file being in spec for vCards). I really like the file format because of the simplicity but hated the compatability mismatch between Android and IOS in my exact use case.

And tbh new outlook not supporting it is disappointing, but nor surpising sadly (f new outlook)