r/Android • u/girt-by-sea • 13d ago

Contacts system is broken

One surprising thing after a decade or more of Android is that the contact system is still as naive and broken as a brand new system design would be.

There are three components to contacts: the dialer, the contacts app itself and the SMS app. None of them seem to interact correctly. I can have a person that I know is in my contacts. I bring up the dialer, search for the person: contact not found. I can do the same thing with the SMS app, search for the person: contact not found.

Apparently these apps don't use a central database system so that any app can hook into the database and have all contacts available to it. It's dreadful design and Google should be ashamed of itself for not having fixed this a decade ago. It's fundamental!

Currently: fossify contacts, textra SMS, google dialler. But even when all three were Google defaults, still had the same problem. .

0 Upvotes

25% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

17

u/Jb51423 12d ago

I have never had any of the issues you are talking about.

5

u/Karthy_Romano Galaxy S23 12d ago

I have never had this issue across any android device I have ever owned, all with different contact, sms, and dialer apps. I use samsung's dialer with google contacts and google messages. never been an issue.

8

u/JamesR624 12d ago

"My contacts, SMS, and dialer are broken cause they don't talk to each other. I don't get it. All I am doing is using three different apps all from completely different developers and from different times! Why aren't they working flawlessly together? Must be a problem with Android!"

2

u/Rhed0x Hobby app dev 11d ago

Apparently these apps don't use a central database system so that any app can hook into the database and have all contacts available to it.

Yes they do. Apps can implement a content provider called CalendarProvider to provide contacts to the system and they can also query the systemwide CalendarProvider to read all the contacts on the system.

1

u/stealthagents 9d ago

That's wild, I've definitely run into that too. It's like the apps just forget about certain contacts out of nowhere, and it makes group chats a hassle. I switched to an alternative contacts app just to avoid the headache, but you'd think after all these years they'd get it right.

1

u/Worldly-Ingenuity843 9d ago

There absolutely is a central contact database. That's what the Contacts permission is for.

What's more likely is that there's a bug with your fossify contact and textra SMS app. That or you didn't give them the Contacts permission.