How to separate Phone's and Gmail's contacts?

When you save contact on your phone then you will get two options – first, saves on phone memory and other one saves on Google's contact. Now, it depends on you where you want.

Let’s come your point, go to contact’s setting, and you will find the Show Contact options and through this option, you separate tour contact list.

On my HTC 10 it's People and I can go to Manage contacts to separate contacts by phone numbers.

this reply is kind of along the same line as the last guy's question, but with a twist... i very rarely use gmail ~ only a handful of contacts.
on the other hand, i have a million contacts with a very specific format in my s6 contacts app. how do i stop Google from making ANY changes whatsoever to my contacts?
i've made the mistake of syncing, and it has been a living nightmare ever since. i even took phone to t mobile store to make sure i had settings correct... em was the only thing i wanted synced; contacts, address book ~ ANY check boxes related to individual people, were NOT marked sync...
i have all of one person's info in one entry, with each number labeled 'home', 'work', etc... makes sense...
but once google has had it's way with my phone, all of that information has been split up willy-nilly ... sometimes it assigns info to the sim card, sometimes it's found under my current gmail address, sometimes it's found under my old gmail address, that i don't even use anymore. (which brings up a whole different problem. because old gmail address is what is linked to allll of my Google Playstore apps, i can't delete old address fr device without having to re-purchase apps ~ yes, i've talked to google playstore abt this very thing).
and to make matters worse, if one person has let's say has 4 different contact numbers, when i pull up my contacts list (for telephone & texting purposes), i now have 4 separate 'Jane Doe' entries i need to sift through to find what i'm really needing.
last, but certainly not least, i have found numbers being synced into the wrong account. for instance Hair Lady phone number is now showing under Happy Dry Cleaning, and Hair Lady info is empty.  i couldn't make this stuff up even if i tried.
i know this is long, but i've tried asking for help with this before, and i can never seem to get people to understand what i'm asking.  i'm sooo frustrated, i can't even begin to explain!

HELP!

This is a Nightmare. Everyone is asking the same question, nobody is answering correctly. Let me ask/explain the issue in a different way.

We all know how to find and edit Google contacts (Please do not explain that again). However 1. How can you view ONLY your phone contacts on Google? 2. Or is it best to edit phone contacts on your mobile first and then Sync? 3. Say you clean your phone contacts on your mobile, what is to stop google adding back on your phone all the phone contacts on your Google account, as it normally does, creating loads of duplicates? 4. Some talk of turning off syncing, however, what if you want to clean and sort your Google phone records, and then turn to sync back on?

If you want to clean up contacts on the phone don't delete too many in too short a time. That's what results in the sync restoring them.

I believe that the reasoning is that if you delete one contact Google assumes it was deliberate and the sync will remove it from the GMail contacts as well (though there is a way of recovering at least for a few weeks should you do this by mistake). Conversely if you delete them all at once it assumes something happened to your phone or you had to reset, and so rather than delete the backup as well it restores them to the phone. And somewhere in between is the point where it changes from one behaviour to the other (I don't remember how many in how short an interval, since it's a few years since I encountered this behaviour).

So if you want to do a major cleanup I think it's probably best to clean up the GMail copy (via a browser) and then let the changes sync with the phone.

Editing and merging contacts don't have this, it's just deletions where at some point it decides that something must have gone wrong and restores from the backup.

Thanks, guys for your replies. Here is what I discovered, the phone lists 'Accounts' under 'Contacts', there you will see a list of 'Gmail' 'WhatsApp' 'Line' etc. Each one has further controls, to 'sync contacts' for example. Android is owned by Google anyway, so by default, all phone contacts are backed up to Google. So step 1. I turn off 'Sync Contacts' on the phone, and work on ALL my contacts online. When I have done a batch of these, say A to L (Cleaning them up, merging with duplicates, deleting unknown or bad emails), then I switch ON 'Sync Contacts' on the mobile. I ran a few tests and Bingo those contacts were all updated as I wanted on the mobile, old numbers I wanted and did delete on google were also deleted on the phone. I am still working on Google contacts, and also I noticed 'Other Contacts' on Google (I think that's where Google adds Messenger type contacts) These contacts are there, however NOT added to your Google Contacts. So next I am working on them, and 'Adding to Contacts'. I am enjoying all this, it's so liberating, to have both a clean organized email list and a clean organized phone number list.

Current phone is a moto E4, which has the option to choose "contacts to display" by gmail accounts, which helps a little, as I have a couple of gmail accounts (although my phone has only heard of 2).
I just got a Samsung A8, which doesn't have the option.
I just looked at contacts online, but the thought of going through about 130 'contacts' still doesn't help me trim the list to contacts with phone numbers, or get this list into my phone.
The problem in my estimation is that I hardly ever use my phone for email, and if I do want to, I just use the email addresses from within the gmail app. I just want contacts with phone numbers on my phone. Starting a few phones ago, I have been managing my own contacts list and diligently exporting (and importing) and backing it up and making sure not to sync contacts ever.
If anyone has heard of a more elegant solution since 2018, I would love to hear it.
thanks.

There are phones where there's really an option for this. They ask you this option when setting the phone up.

sullencab said:

There are phones where there's really an option for this. They ask you this option when setting the phone up.

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Great, thanks!

palooka said:

...................................
The problem .......... is that I hardly ever use my phone for email, and if I do want to, I just use the email addresses from within the gmail app. I just want contacts with phone numbers on my phone. Starting a few phones ago, I have been managing my own contacts list and diligently exporting (and importing) and backing it up and making sure not to sync contacts ever.
If anyone has heard of a more elegant solution since 2018, I would love to hear it.
thanks........................

Click to expand...

This is the solution that I have found and used. I found it by simply stabbing around without fully understanding the result in advance, and totally ignoring the almost universal advice to turn sync ON.
I now have sync turned OFF and it will stay that way.
I now appear to have a fully stable and reliable set of phone numbers in my Contact application.
I will report back if by chance it does not turn out this way.
Many thanks for this thread and the replies.

Jim.