Ask HN: My app on iOS can no longer read contacts info. Why? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: My app on iOS can no longer read contacts info. Why?

1 pointEGreg9 comments

My company’s app, Groups, has been using the AddressBook API ever since the beginning. It was deprecated in iOS 10 but continued to work. Now, it is able to read the contact names, but not the emails and numbers anymore, and editing groups seems to fail too. Did iOS 17 somehow destroy the AddressBook framework? Is there any info on the internet about this?

Other contact management apps seem to be doing just fine.

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It was deprecated seven years ago - and even making it from iOS 9 to iOS 10 needed an update to request permissions.

Deprecation is an announcement that "we aren't supporting this and it may stop working someday without warning". Someday has arrived...

In general, allowing 3rd party software full access to contact info is a full blown privacy disaster that should have been recognized as such from the start.

It’s a private contact management app. Community leaders around the world have been using it since 2012 to initiate mass messages to their congregation etc. How are they supposed to do that? We never sent their contact information to any servers.

We never sent their contact information to any servers.

What you do and what others do are not necessarily the same.

You should still be able to obtain access with "proper" user consent but the definition of "proper" may have been revised.

Maybe you need to give the app more permissions?

Which ones? It already has permissions to access the Contacts.

i wouldnt know, im not an apple user...another option that comes to mind is to downgrade back to ios16, if thats possible at all

We should tell our users to downgrade to iOS16 so our app would work? Ha ha

oh i see...youre the company producing that software...in that case, get a decent developer and bloody update the app, nobody waits 7 years for an app update!

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