My findings
I am designing a logic to sync contact with my Backend. I gone through some apps that doing same thing in IOS. I will take the example of WhatsApp, I found that When I update any contact in Native Addressbook, it reflect that change into Whatsapp withing a fraction.
My Concern
I just want to know that how it is syncing in a very faster way. Even a new contact gets synced with its Remote server and get displayed on contact, and with the ability to initiate Whatsapp chat if that number is registered one.
Summary of Queries
So, in nutshell my queries are,
How Whatsapp is syncing the contact?
How whatsapp is getting just updated contact list from Native Addressbook (if it's doing so) ?
How whatsapp is just getting just new Contact added in addressbook, is there anything that manages like timestamp or anything else?
I know the following things are there like,
ABAddressBookGetPersonCount
ABAddressBookGetPersonWithRecordID
ABAddressBookCopyArrayOfAllPeople
Using the ABAddressBookGetPersonCount i can know if any new contacts are there but still how i will be able to know its Record ID without iterating each contact using ABAddressBookCopyArrayOfAllPeople
So i am just asking for the way to get just updated list.
The way to do this is by registering an external change callback. This way, your app will be notified of any changes to the address book as soon as they happen.
Related
At some point I noticed I’m seeing vcard coding or something to that effect and a bunch of my iPhone contacts. Please look at the example is there any way to fix this without having to go into each individual contact and delete the tags etc. it looks to be some type of V card code reference.
As you can see in the attached image for Apple headquarters, there is corrupted data. This is happening in a lot of my contacts I am seeing things such as X-SOCIALPROFILE at the end of phone numbers, etc..
I have another client that is experiencing the same issue (both with phone number and country name fields). I am posting something to the Apple forum hoping that someone there has an answer.
I think I figured out the issue.
Adding my work email, I had accidentally checked sync contacts. It is Microsoft based so it corrupted a bunch of my contacts trying to pull vCard data etc.
Also, Facebook messenger was corrupting my contacts
I disabled both of these syncing features, on my Mac went into contacts and searched for “x”
I found a lot of things like X-social etc appended to phone numbers etc
Based on this search in contacts I has to manually cleanup about 30 contacts. After about 1 hour my phone was synced to the updated iCloud contacts and everything is good.
Bottom line. Choose one source of truth to sync your contacts like iCloud.
Don’t allow 3rd party apps to access your contacts.
If you need anymore information let me know
I've noticed that many apps like Skype, Slack, Telegram etc, are able to show the ID of contacts saved within those apps in my native iOS recent calls list as if they are existing contacts.
Here's a great example I found in a Google search:
I currently manually store and manipulate contacts to get this same effect for an app I'm currently working on. It's a bit messy and I'm wondering if I can somehow achieve what all of these apps achieve?
I've searched around but I'm not sure where I should be looking. The CNContactStore class doesn't mention anything about this.
How can do this, or where should I be looking to learn how to do it?
Paulw11's comment was the answer to my question:
They report the name via a CXCallUpdate when they report the incoming
call. If your app isn't a voip app then you can create a callkit
directory extension github.com/paulw11/CallKitTutorial
Is there a URL to open the contacts application from within my application? I know you can achieve this with the settings app by using the UIApplicationOpenSettingsURLString constant in Swift; however, I wasn't sure if I could do the same with the Contacts app.
There isn't a deep link for opening the Contacts App.
Apple is very picky when it comes to deep-linking. They have to provide one for Settings since many apps need services like Data, Location, Bluetooth, Wifi, etc.
Unfortunately they do not extend this to the Contacts App.
However if your app needs contact information then for that Apple has provided a Contacts framework to browse through your contacts within your app itself.
Read more about it here.
In order to add/update/delete/merge contacts directly from your app without using the Apple's Contact UI, use the CNSaveRequest APIs. More on that here.
The closest thing you can get to opening a contact is to write them a message in IMessage. From this screen the user can press the contact icon and open the contact page for that particular contact.
You can do this by opening the url sms://+44776382223 where the number is the number of the person that you would like to view the contact of.
Pretty new to CloudKit. Trying to get all the contacts who are using my app. According to the docs and the tutorials out there I'm calling this:
discoverAllIdentities(completionHandler:)
The issue is that only my user (the one who is logged in on the device where the app is running) is returned. So I did some digging and noticed that if I call this one:
discoverUserIdentity(withPhoneNumber:completionHandler:)
and I use phone number directly the user is returned.
So after more investigation, I figured that the reason I do not get those users is that in my Contacts those users do not have their iCloud email stored. So once I add the email, they are returned by discoverAllIdentities(completionHandler:). So it appears the default implementation of that method is tied to iCloud emails for the discovery instead of phone number.
Is it possible to use phone number for discoverAllIdentities(completionHandler:)? Since, I don't think that as you add a new contact you would record anything but just phone number, so you will be missing to discover all those users.
Any kind of help is highly appreciated.
I'm building an alcohol prevention app and one of the features is to block the user's contacts for a given period of time so that they don't irresponsibly make drunken calls/texts to people.
The current (and very old) version implements it by letting the user select in-app which contacts to block. Then, it directly changes the selected contacts' phone numbers to an invalid one. That way, even if the user goes to the Phone or Messages app, the call or text won't be sent to the contact because the number is invalid.
I very strongly dislike this approach because it screws up with your address book which can be synced across multiple devices. What I have in mind is to:
Create a separate ABGroup or ABSource of contacts for my app
Copy all the contacts from other groups and sources into my app's group or source
Falsify all the contacts' phone numbers in my app's group or source
Disable all the other groups or source in the main Contacts app.
My question is: Is this possible? I looked into the ABSource and ABGroup references but can't find properties to disable them, but I'm hoping it's available somewhere in the SDK and that I'm just being blind.
If it's not possible, I'd be happy to hear any ideas for alternative implementations (iCloud backups, write original data into a file and screw up everything then put it back later, etc).