Thinking about leaving Android
 

I hate the People/Contacts list in Android so much that I'm seriously thinking about leaving the Android system.

(I'm referring to Android "fishing" any and all persons you have ever e-mailed, phoned, skyped, etc ... and building a contact list based on this. I also hate - to a slightly lesser degree - that Android "pushes" new versions on you, with "new and improved features" and don't let you decide if you want to keep the old or the new way).

I'm NOT considering a move to Apple.

So, a question to Windows Phone users: How customizable is it? As much as a Windows (computer) environment? Any drawbacks? Please share your experience.

And to a more general audience: are there any (fully customizable) option(s) to Android / iOS / Windows Phone?

(I have some technical knowledge with (Windows) computers, not so much with phones, smart or not; so not shy on learning other OSes, if necessary)

What kind of phone do you have? On the ones I use I can decide which contacts to show.

FWIW; Windows Phone is even worse, its Facebook contact integration seriously messed up my contacts database.

I'd find a third party app that can help here, it sounds like something that can easily be fixed.

I have a Nexus 4 and two Nexus 7's, and I get to decide whether I want the updates or not. My Nexus 4 is still on 4.2.1 just in case I wanted to enable LTE ;) One of my Nexus 7 will not be upgraded because I really like the blue/gray WiFi icon vs. White in the latest version. Too bad I had to 'upgrade' one Nexus 7 to find out I don't like the new version.

I bought a Lumia 520 just to check out Windows Phone, and the availability of Apps is pretty poor. I certainly don't see everything I use regularly on it. But I do like Here Map, which is a main selling point of Lumia devices as far as I am concerned.

Leaving Android and not going to iOS is probably pretty hard. I have an iPod touch which gives me access to iOS App eco system. For example, the iOS version of Google Hangouts allows VoIP calls but the Android version does not....

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.

Moto G, with Android 4.4, I believe. I was told that in previous versions it was possible to select what it is shown, but that this in not possible anymore (and I have looked at it and have found nothing)

I also looked for a phonebook only app and have not found any.

Thanks for the information about the Windows Phone problem; I'm afraid to an even worse situation.

Thanks for your report. I'm having a hard time getting used to the whole smartphone concept as it is implemented: my previous phone was a Motorola flip-phone (Razr V, I believe :D). It is nice to have some computing power in my hands, but I'm not used to the always on, always (and fully) connected environment. I vastly prefer an on-demand system, where I'm not interrupted every few minutes with some notification or other, mostly irrelevant.

I'm used to fully customized computers (both hardware and software), so no love for the Apple approach here and no desire to enter their ecosystem.

My previous experience with Android was through an Asus TFT700 tablet (which was wi-fi only) so I had not encountered these "features" I really dislike until the battery of my old phone died.

I'm in Brazil; my phone is unlocked. It's Motorola that pushes the upgrades.

I'm open to root the phone, but it being unlocked, I don't know if I will gain something doing it. As I said (replying to ScottC), in my version of Android there is not the option to display phone-only contacts (I googled it and indeed, it is one of the "new enhanced features" of newer Android versions.)

I only want the phone to keep the phone numbers. If I try to enter a name and phone number combination, and I enter the name with any slight variation with the name of that person retrieved by Android looking at Skype or e-mail, I will have a duplicate entry for that person (in some fora, people complain of having several entries for the same person).

I can't believe that there is not a simple way to do it; the current one looks (at least to me) inefficient and a mess. Hate to have to deal with it.

First time I heard of "Gesture Search"; will take a look at it. Thanks!

That would bug me, too. That's why I configure my Android apps not to notify me, except of course for those notifications which I find worthwhile.

One thing I like about the Android platform is that it is very customizable. Because much of it is open source, people can modify it to meet their needs, and we can benefit from the modifications of others. I don't think you'll find that on any other platform, so Android is probably as good as you're going to get.

That said, it's not yet clear to me how you'd like it to work. If you could explain it here, perhaps I or others can recommend some customizations. For example, one thing that irritated me at first -- maybe this is what you're talking about -- was that the Contacts app seemed to list every contact address (including email addresses), but I don't send email from the Contacts app, so I changed it to list only those contacts that have phone numbers.

Also, there are a number of replacement contact list apps in the Play store. I've tried a few, but I'm able to make the stock Contacts app work well enough for my needs.

Mikew99, that is the point! In Android 4.4 (which came with my phone) the Contacts app changed its name to People, and there is no more the option to hide contacts with e-mail addresses only - now ALL contacts are listed. I would be happy if it were possible to chose to display only the contacts with phone numbers, but this option is not in my version.

Apparently, all of you that are saying that this is trivial to do have older versions of Android.

Now that you mention it, I remember being frustrated with the overload of contacts and relieved when I found the setting to only display those with phone numbers.

The contacts list in the dialer in Android 4.4 does that automatically. Just touch the Search icon in the dialer to expose it.

Gotcha. This was indeed very easy in Gingerbread (one simple check box) and still relatively easy (but more complex) in Jelly Bean, but I'm still on 4.2.2, so I can't help with Kit Kat. :(

Hmmm maybe this is something new in 4.4. I am still in 4.3 with my Galaxy Note II. I don't know.. 4.4 sounds bad.. LOL. It seems strange that it would take out all the filtering options. I would go to androidcentral or xda forums for your phone and ask someone there to see if they could help you on the contact (or People) thingy. :p

The worst is that 4.4 is bad and you just have to root it and put on 4.3 or something earlier.

Just tried this on my HTC One M8 (so, definitely running Android 4.4). The first option upon navigating to People > Settings is a toggle to "Filter Contacts" which lets you elect to only show contacts with phone numbers.

It is indeed trivial.

Windows Phone doesn't do any of the "contacts fishing" you described.

As for the contacts themselves, you pick which accounts (email, Facebook, etc) show up in your contacts list, whether to filter out contacts w/o phone numbers, and whether to sort/display first/last or last/first.

And that's about all the options there are for contacts. Some folks coming from Android may find the lack of options problematic but I've become a fan of the streamlined approach that eliminates the need to explore every nook and cranny of options menus to get things set up "just so". That's not to say that WP is dumbed down, it's just designed differently from Android, with an emphasis on different things.

On WP you can avoid updates if you want to, but so far you pretty much never want to do that.

The difference in size of the app stores can be an issue -- depending on what you want to do. What apps do you use most?

My Android ver is 4.4.2

Trying to manage the contacts list, the options are as follows:

People => Me => Contacts to Display => Customize => Define Custom View

and then it lists, as the only options, my accounts: Skype, e-mail, Google+ (which I didn't activate, but they list it anyway).

My only choices are to include or exclude each account as a whole, except on the e-mail accounts, where there is option to select My Contacts (Current selected), Starred, Friends, Family, CoWorkers, All Others. No option to select Phones only.

(This is a Motorola Phone, sold while Motorola was a Google company; so I believe this is stock Android - no Motorola customizations)

Thanks, tai4de2. I'm used to fully customize all computing environments I use, which is mainly Windows based, to the ways that best fits my needs/workflow; so I really dislike when I was forced to work otherwise than my way. I know that Windows Phone has a much smaller selection base of apps but this is not an absolute impediment to me as I'm open to doing things through a browser if necessary.

I don't use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or other social networks, send and receive few text messages, find checking e-mail on the phone a missed blessing (and usually don't reply or send e-mail on the phone).

I use it mostly for browsing, Skype, phone calls ;), VLC (video watching), Cool Reader (e-book reader), Google Maps, also have some apps such as AA and one for my Bank, which are nice to have on the phone but rarely used.

Don't know if a Windows Phone environment would have these apps, but the make or break thing to me would be how customizable it is. Guess I would only know for sure after having some hands on time on it, for sure, but what I'm trying to do asking here is how Windows Phone compares vis-a-vis Windows OS in terms of customizability: Windows Phone is Windows only in name or is it comparable to a real OS, with lots of customizable options?

- - -

As an aside, are there other options beyond Android, Windows Phone and iOS?
Are there any phones with a Linux-based OS?

Yup. Android is a flavor of Linux.

My Android 4.4.2 People app is the same as yours. I think the designers' thought is that People is where you go for complete contact information; you go to the dialer when you want to make a call. If you follow that path you'll find it doesn't matter how your contacts display in People: only contacts with phone numbers display when you search for a contact within the dialer.

Personally I like the new dialer that searches everything. I have a Nexus 5 running 4.4.2 - which should closely match your motorola phone experience. HTC tends to include their versions of certain apps so you can't always compare. However the beauty of Android is if you don't like the "stock" way of doing things you can use a 3rd party app to replace almost any function.

Go Contacts Pro (free) can do what you need: https://play.google.com/store/apps/d....jiubang.gopim

As is iOS. But it is not fully customizable.

No it isn't. It's based on the BSD fork of UNIX.

Ubuntu is theoretically capable of running a phone - the new version of Ubuntu is the first to support it.

I agree, except many apps (specifically, games) do not give you an option to disable notifications in their settings. You have to go into Application Manager page to disable them.

Windows Phone is not a palm-sized incarnation of desktop Windows. It is not designed to be heavily customizable in the same sense that desktop Windows is open and customizable. I used to be more of the "customize everything" type but now that I am used to WP when I have to use Android I find exploring lots of menu nooks and crannies in order to tweak everything to be a tiresome PITA. This is of course entirely subjective and personal. That all applies to the built-in experiences; apps can do what they want just like on Android, and some offer more exhaustive configuration options than others.

Some of the apps you mention exist on Windows Phone: Skype, AA, maps (native maps are from Nokia but several excellent Google Maps clients exist), ... your bank may or may not have an app. There are media players and e-book readers but I am less familiar with specifics there. You can check on http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/overview.

Interesting discussion. I recently very nearly ditched my iPhone for an Android, because there's a lot I don't like about Apple. But the seemless integration of Contacts and Calendars with Outlook was what persuaded me to stay with iPhone. Reading this, I'm pleased with the decision.

tai4de2, your posts have been very informative. Thank you!

Thanks, I will take a look at it.

Thanks for pointing it to me; in my frustration I was overlooking this. I will settle (for now, absent better options) for it, while I look at the Ubuntu viability suggested by gfunkdave.

I think you may have gone down the wrong menu path; unless it is really missing on your OS version. My "Only contacts with phones" option is not under "Contacts to Display" path. It is actually under "Settings" right below "Contacts to Display". The first box under "Settings" inside "Contacts App" is "Only contacts with phones" check box.

Did you try Go Contacts Pro as I linked to earlier?

Also, don't hold your breath for the Ubuntu for Android project it seems to be on hold: http://www.androidauthority.com/ubun...-limbo-374454/

That menu option is not available in my People app. My Android version is 4.4, not 4.4.2 as I mistakenly posted earlier. Like OP, my phone is a Motorola. Although I understand it's mostly vanilla Android, there could be some differences.

Here's a screenshot showing the Settings menu:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...360x640%29.jpg

I think the question is moot, though. The solution is to quit using the People app and just look up contacts from within the dialer.

If you have specific questions about the new version of Windows Phone coming out in a few months, let me know. I've been running it for several weeks, and am very impressed with the new features that come with it.

Not yet (Go Contacts Pro), but it is in my shortlist.

Sad to know about the abandonment of the Ubuntu project.

I really would like to have a real computer in a handheld device (phablet-like), with phone capability. It is now in the realm of the possible (at least in terms of hardware): just a few years ago we had netbooks running Windows XP with less computing power (CPU + RAM) than the current generation of smartphones. Why are today's smartphones OSes so primitive/restricted?

Thanks, rybob. Could you point me to some literature?

Until three months ago I was a cell phone (only) user; my current smartphone (Moto G) was an attempt to use a middle of the road, not too expensive smartphone to "feel the water". You can rightly deduce that I was not overwhelmed; and I believe the problem is the software, not the hardware capabilities (see my previous post).

From Microsoft's own site:
http://www.windowsphone.com/en-US/features-8-1

For additional reading from some of the fan boy blogs, that typically have good/accurate information (note there are 5 pages):
http://www.wpcentral.com/windows-phone-81-review

I'd start there anyways. One piece of advice, if you do go the Windows Phone route over Android, get a Nokia, and probably something like the 920, 930, 1020 or if you really want a big screen 1520. The Icon on Verizon I hear has great reviews, and the 925 is solid on T-Mobile & AT&T. Nokia (now Microsoft), has a very strong track record of updating their phones, something that can't be said for Samsung and HTC. I've received at least 4 updates on my Lumia 1520 so far. Nokia also does a lot with extending the capabilities of the phone. Things such as the glance screen and the call blocking capabilities.