Originally Posted by
Need
For Android phones, it is the carriers that pushed the OS updates. You could either get a non-carrier based phone like Nexus or Google Edition version phones or root your phone. Then you get to control when or if you want to update the OS.
For the extra contacts, you could filter and not display "other contacts". You could even delete them from time to time. I don't know which Android phone you got, but on the Galaxy line it is very easy to control your contact list.
Forums are a great place to consider how other people perceive things. It had never occurred to me to have a gripe about my phone's voluminous contacts list. I look at the list so rarely that I couldn't even remember how to find it.
(It's in the "People" app on my phone. When I got the phone, People was in the dock at the bottom of my launcher. After a while, I realized I never used it, so I removed it from there in favor of something else.)
I never use People because I look up my contacts either by talking to the phone or with Gesture Search.
Getting back to the OP's gripe, I see that People can organize contacts by groups and by favorites. A quick look at mine reveals that I've never used Groups: I just looked up my son and found I never added him to my Family group.
People lets me specify which contacts I want it to display. The "Contacts to display" setting lists all possible contact sources plus a Customize option where I could make my own fine-tuned list. This would all seem like a waste of time to me; as I said, I just scribble my contact's name in the Gesture Search window and go from there. I like letting the phone do the work.