Intro
So honestly I feel like I’m that guy that never deletes a single contact. I get notifications on my phone for birthdays for people I don’t like. And more importantly applications like WhatsApp and even my beloved Telegram will sync my local contacts with people who I don’t really want to talk to anymore.
I’ve had a nickel for every time I got a person you hate has just joined WhatsApp or random burger place has joined Telegram I have like five bucks but that’s about $5 more than I’d really like to have considering some of these people I never wanted to talk to again.
So I went on the journey of trying to both clean out my address book while still being able to get notifications if people I really don’t like call me or text me.
The way Android deals with contacts is it loves to just lump everything into one big giant global address book your quote contacts this is less than ideal from a privacy perspective and honestly I really can’t complain too much consider I’m using a product made by a search company Linux Roots be damned.
Fortunately some really nice folks on GitHub and f-Droid cooked up some apps that ended up solving my problem after ironically enough digging through perplexity and Gemini for about a good hour.
DecSync
Export all of your contacts from people you don’t want to talk to anymore into one giant VCF.
Now you may want to be able to edit that contact book from time to time while still having it not tied with every single person on your phone.
This is where DecSync comes in. You can import that VCF file of those people you don’t like into their and toggle it on and off so as you need to move contacts in and out of it you can from any standard Android contact app.
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.decsync.cc
Alternate
So for all the folks reading this if you want to still get that caller ID notification for somebody who you don’t like but you don’t want them to end up in your WhatsApp or your telegram or even your signal try this little app I found on fdroid called Alternate.
https://apt.izzysoft.de/packages/com.lulu786.Alternate
You can then feed in that VCF file that you exported from DecSync, and voila you now have caller ID for all the people you don’t like while still having them not show up in your signal chats by accident.
Conclusion
If this blog post helps you out please let me know because God knows I’m always trying to figure out a better solution for privacy on my mobile devices.
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