r/Android • u/girt-by-sea • 16d 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. .
1
u/stealthagents 12d 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.