Wednesday, November 1, 2017

iOS Feature Wish: Contact Provider Extensions

Dave DeLong:

I really wish iOS offered a way for these apps (Facebook, Next Door, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) to “donate” their contact information to the system database in a non-permanent way. (By “non-permanent” I mean “don’t just dump it in to my iCloud contacts and call it good”; deleting the app would cause that info to disappear, and the app could update it on-demand) There would need to be some pretty intelligent merging that happens, but generally it’s pretty safe to assume that an individual with a certain phone number and email address is probably the same individual as another with the same phone number and email address. You’d also have to consider how to handle apps that provide unboundedly-large data sets (like the corporate directory for a 50,000+ employee company). But, these are solvable problems.

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> You’d also have to consider how to handle apps that provide unboundedly-large data sets (like the corporate directory for a 50,000+ employee company).

He must be talking about when LinkedIn sweeps the entire company directory after the CTO logs in on his iPhone for the first time...

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