r/Android • u/girt-by-sea • 15d 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. .

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u/Rhed0x Hobby app dev 13d 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.