> but roughly every 30 seconds Pure speculation. How do you know? It could be just as well that Whatsapp queries contacts one by one at the moment they are sup

> but roughly every 30 seconds Pure speculation. How do you know? It could be just as well that Whatsapp queries contacts one by one at the moment they are supposed to show up on the screen. That way you could easily have 150 times (depending on the size of your contact list) your database accessed by scrolling once through your complete contact list. Or the author is one of the few that has 1k contacts. In this case basically any operation that requires querying every single contact every now and then could cause this. Also: the thumbnails you see of your contacts are accessed via URIs - could be that Android increases the counter every time you show a thumbnail of a contact. (it is part of your contacts information)