I can not speak for others or the consensus but since the 90's I have always just used a plain text file with simple delimiters in a format that I understand so that I can massage the output format to match whatever needs the information. This has worked great for me and is simple to back up and newer versions make this easy to get a good compression ratio of a single tarball of every version. Multiple files as many people have passed away and a few people are no longer friends but I keep older versions to remind me of them.
I use a very low-tech approach. A spreadsheet (LibreOffice) with name, position, company and phone number in the leftmost columns and then a column for each form of contact. Copy and paste into the various apps and over-time the apps build their individual contact lists. People don't change their identities often enough for me to want to automate synchronization across the various apps.\
If you are contacting more than a hundred or so persons, then you are running bulk emails which is a different issue.
I keep things very simple. I have a Single Source of Truth for all my contacts. Right now, I'm using a contact app on my phone for this, but over the years I've used different things. The exact method isn't important to me, what's important is having an authoritative contact list.
I don't sync anything with anything. I look up a contact and enter whatever detail I need manually wherever it's needed. I lean a lot on the frequently-used autocomplete lots of applications have, too, but that's a convenience that I don't take as authoritative.
I use Clay (https://clay.earth/) but haven't used it much as I found the search was lacking (my primary use case is searching for contacts that fulfill X criteria)
I exclusively use Google Contacts. I have 3 devices and Contacts adequately manages everything in the cloud. It also adequately syncs to Outlook-style contacts, but I barely use anything in the Outlook ecosystem except for email itself.
I find Google Contacts still quite deficient in a few respects:
As with Outlook, it's clearly geared towards personal use (even in the enterprise-class Workspaces) and each individual Contact is meant to represent one individual person who's optionally associated with one individual business only.
This makes trouble for many aspects. I rarely contact individuals who aren't associated with businesses. But within a business, there are usually multiple contacts needed to organize all the departments I interface with. Many do not have personal names or one person! They are, e.g. "Customer Service", or "Billing". Also, many contacts involve Robo-SMS, for security codes, or notifications, and those are paramount to be stored as Contacts, because of their sensitive nature, I want them whitelisted and identified and prioritized properly.
So sometimes I cram more than one contact into an item, with multiple phone numbers/email addresses. But I've found that the tagging doesn't work so well; usually Contacts will "forget" that I tagged them as "Custom - <some string>" and blank them out. And that's uncool.
It is not possible to make folders or containers of groups of contacts (other than tagging them). There is no inheritance or linking of data. So if I have 6 contacts from "example.com" they are all 100% independent of one another, even if they share data. So I must replicate that data and carefully update them all in unison. There's no syncing or associating them.
I don't know any elegant solution for a single app or a single format, that still probably needs to conform closely to the .VCF type exports. But there clearly need to be richer features for organizing and linking data, for ease of maintenance, because I do maintain hundreds of contacts, even active ones, and it's a burden to keep them up-to-date.
The Google integration helps a little bit; it's good when someone's profile avatar populates automatically, or it pulls in data from Maps. More of that, please!
Thanks for the detailed response. I totally agree, Google Contacts can feel limiting, especially when dealing with a lot of business-related contacts where roles and departments come into play. The lack of robust tagging and organization tools like folders or containers is definitely a pain point.
I can not speak for others or the consensus but since the 90's I have always just used a plain text file with simple delimiters in a format that I understand so that I can massage the output format to match whatever needs the information. This has worked great for me and is simple to back up and newer versions make this easy to get a good compression ratio of a single tarball of every version. Multiple files as many people have passed away and a few people are no longer friends but I keep older versions to remind me of them.
I use a very low-tech approach. A spreadsheet (LibreOffice) with name, position, company and phone number in the leftmost columns and then a column for each form of contact. Copy and paste into the various apps and over-time the apps build their individual contact lists. People don't change their identities often enough for me to want to automate synchronization across the various apps.\
If you are contacting more than a hundred or so persons, then you are running bulk emails which is a different issue.
I keep things very simple. I have a Single Source of Truth for all my contacts. Right now, I'm using a contact app on my phone for this, but over the years I've used different things. The exact method isn't important to me, what's important is having an authoritative contact list.
I don't sync anything with anything. I look up a contact and enter whatever detail I need manually wherever it's needed. I lean a lot on the frequently-used autocomplete lots of applications have, too, but that's a convenience that I don't take as authoritative.
I use Clay (https://clay.earth/) but haven't used it much as I found the search was lacking (my primary use case is searching for contacts that fulfill X criteria)
Google may be a privacy issue... So I would love to have the possibility to prevent anyone putting my info in their contacts in Google.
I personally use a paid E-Mail service (mailbox.org) and a self hosted nextcloud.
The APP myphoneexplorer can be used to sync offline.
What apps and contexts?
I use synching and vcard files.
Thanks for the response. I've added more information above.
Like which apps and which contexts?
I exclusively use Google Contacts. I have 3 devices and Contacts adequately manages everything in the cloud. It also adequately syncs to Outlook-style contacts, but I barely use anything in the Outlook ecosystem except for email itself.
I find Google Contacts still quite deficient in a few respects:
As with Outlook, it's clearly geared towards personal use (even in the enterprise-class Workspaces) and each individual Contact is meant to represent one individual person who's optionally associated with one individual business only.
This makes trouble for many aspects. I rarely contact individuals who aren't associated with businesses. But within a business, there are usually multiple contacts needed to organize all the departments I interface with. Many do not have personal names or one person! They are, e.g. "Customer Service", or "Billing". Also, many contacts involve Robo-SMS, for security codes, or notifications, and those are paramount to be stored as Contacts, because of their sensitive nature, I want them whitelisted and identified and prioritized properly.
So sometimes I cram more than one contact into an item, with multiple phone numbers/email addresses. But I've found that the tagging doesn't work so well; usually Contacts will "forget" that I tagged them as "Custom - <some string>" and blank them out. And that's uncool.
It is not possible to make folders or containers of groups of contacts (other than tagging them). There is no inheritance or linking of data. So if I have 6 contacts from "example.com" they are all 100% independent of one another, even if they share data. So I must replicate that data and carefully update them all in unison. There's no syncing or associating them.
I don't know any elegant solution for a single app or a single format, that still probably needs to conform closely to the .VCF type exports. But there clearly need to be richer features for organizing and linking data, for ease of maintenance, because I do maintain hundreds of contacts, even active ones, and it's a burden to keep them up-to-date.
The Google integration helps a little bit; it's good when someone's profile avatar populates automatically, or it pulls in data from Maps. More of that, please!
Thanks for the detailed response. I totally agree, Google Contacts can feel limiting, especially when dealing with a lot of business-related contacts where roles and departments come into play. The lack of robust tagging and organization tools like folders or containers is definitely a pain point.