Alternatives to Google Contacts

Google Contacts is the default app on almost every Android phone and, naturally, syncs your entire address book to Google's servers. Samsung has its own app, Microsoft has Outlook — all solid, all with the same underlying problem: your contacts live on someone else's servers.

Finding a complete alternative means solving two separate problems: where your contacts are stored (on your own server, with a European provider, or only on-device) and which app displays and manages them. Cloud solutions use the open CardDAV protocol, which works on Android via DAVx⁵ and natively on iOS.

If you just want to get rid of Google's app without worrying about cloud sync, a local app that transmits nothing works perfectly well.