I have decided and am struggling to maintain a single common contact list. As none of the online options can keep their hands off my list I am using Outlook (from MSoffice) and then sync it back to google on my phone and portable devices. I use an Open source program Go Contact Sync Mod to Sync occasionally. I had everything working smoothly when the whatsapp incident occurred.
I discovered that WhatsApp had invaded my phone with a lot of obsolete contact info. So I turned off GOOGLE and turned on only WhatsApp Contacts in the Stock People APP on my HTCOne M7. I then deleted about 200 "bad" contacts that I thought belonged to WhatsApp then turned Google back on. On my next sync I found that the 200 Bad contacts were still there and 200 Good contacts from Google Contacts list were deleted. I managed to catch it before Outlook was invaded also and I lost them forever.
Very Frustrating...
The message is - don't rely on the phone app to reliably manage contacts, it is too busy trying to merge obsolete data and generally make things worse.
Use the original app to add/delete its own contacts and avoid sharing contacts between apps.
The best place to add delete contacts is on the phone as the numbers come in but editing must be done cautiously,
This is just my sorry tale - cost me about 4 hours of my life.
Hopefully someone will read this and stay away from the delete key in Stock Contacts App.
I discovered that WhatsApp had invaded my phone with a lot of obsolete contact info. So I turned off GOOGLE and turned on only WhatsApp Contacts in the Stock People APP on my HTCOne M7. I then deleted about 200 "bad" contacts that I thought belonged to WhatsApp then turned Google back on. On my next sync I found that the 200 Bad contacts were still there and 200 Good contacts from Google Contacts list were deleted. I managed to catch it before Outlook was invaded also and I lost them forever.
Very Frustrating...
The message is - don't rely on the phone app to reliably manage contacts, it is too busy trying to merge obsolete data and generally make things worse.
Use the original app to add/delete its own contacts and avoid sharing contacts between apps.
The best place to add delete contacts is on the phone as the numbers come in but editing must be done cautiously,
This is just my sorry tale - cost me about 4 hours of my life.
Hopefully someone will read this and stay away from the delete key in Stock Contacts App.
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