Android will now get the contact picker finally. I wonder what this means for contact scopes on GrapheneOS.
12 Likes
It will probably be a more intuitive interface so it’s likely GrapheneOS will adopt it but it will be interesting to see what happens.
2 Likes
Would be nice to categorize contacts in to groups such as public/private and just allow access for particular groups.
It seems to me that one manager at Google looks at what GrapheneOS did and throws the idea for the next meeting.
Anyway, I am always happy when a privacy feature becomes available for more people out of the box.
It looks like a subset of the functionality Contact Scopes provides and without support for existing apps. It looks more similar to the iOS 18 take on this which was added after the more flexible Contact Scopes in GrapheneOS supporting partial data per contact and grouping.
Big question is, does it make GrapheneOS’s maintenance burden for Contact Scopes easier? GrapheneOS is resource-constrained (a bit like a smartphone ha) so the easier it is for them to enhance this to their standard (and the sooner their lead developer returns from conscription) the more bandwidth they have for potentially new features/changes/improvements (please be backups, please be backups, please be backups).
GrapheneOS contact scopes pretends to the app that it has full permission. If Google implements this differently, privacy invasive apps like WhatsApp will force the user to grant full contacts permission.
I imagine they would prefer things be done upstream, but the upcoming implementation is unlikely to match current behavior of contact scopes, so it’s unlikely to change much for them.