Android 17 is building a new Contacts Picker to keep your address book priv

[phillynews215]

TL;DR

• Google is developing a new Contacts Picker tool for Android 17 to fix the current all-or-nothing contacts permission.
• This tool will allow you to share specific contacts with an app, rather than your entire contacts list.
• Access will be a one-time snapshot, and apps can request only the specific data fields they need.

Your device’s contacts list holds a treasure trove of sensitive data that many apps want to get their hands on. Fortunately, Android’s permissions system prevents apps from accessing your contacts without your knowledge. Unfortunately, it’s an all-or-nothing system: You either grant an app access to all your contacts or none of them. This is highly problematic because it forces you to grant many apps full access to your contacts even if they don’t need it. Next year’s Android 17 update could tackle this problem by introducing a system Contacts Picker tool that allows you to select specific contacts to share with an app, rather than giving it access to your entire contacts list.

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How Android apps currently read your device’s contacts

Every Android phone has a centralized, local database of contacts. The operating system guards access to this database to prevent apps from reading it directly. Instead, apps must interact with the Contacts Provider, a system component that provides APIs for retrieving or modifying information in the contacts database. To use these APIs, applications must hold the READ_CONTACTS permission to read data and the WRITE_CONTACTS permission to write it.




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