I'm new to Android and I must admit it's been frustrating setting up the contacts. I only want local contacts stored, I don't want it to sync anything. When I added my work email it synced 5000 contacts without asking and it was a huge hassle to get rid of them. (Why you wouldn't be able to "select all" from a certain group and delete it the Contacts app, I have no idea). Then after I deleted all the contacts from the work email somehow sync got turned back on by itself.
Anyways, now I deleted them again and hopefully sync won't turn back on. But this is pretty brutal, I've spent hours on this.
So now when I add a local contact if they're on WhatsApp, it creates another entry. If they're on Signal, it creates yet another entry and when I search for the contact I see them 3 times. I'm trying to understand why WhatsApp etc can't just read my contacts from my list, or if it needs to store them can't it do that internally? I don't want to see a separate list for WhatsApp contacts on my phone that just duplicates ones I added.
I know I can merge them, but I'd prefer not to as I don't want to see 10 different call options when I click on someone (Call this person with WhatApp, call them with Signal, call them with your actual phone). I don't use messengers to call people. It also seems like you can only merge them manually every time you add someone which is kind of a pain.
Am I missing something here or is that the only way this works?
Thank you for reading.
Edit: The frustrating thing is when I delete all the WhatsApp contacts it still works fine. When I go to "New Chat" I still see everyone on there that has WhatsApp. So why does it need to create a separate entry for every person listed there