Private Contacts is an Android app to manage your contacts with additional features for privacy and data protection not offered by your phone's default contacts app.
When any app (e.g. a messenger like WhatsApp) asks for permission to access your phone's contacts, the choice is purely binary: You either give it access to all your contacts or none of them. In that moment you will likely feel fine about sharing the phone-numbers of your friends who also have the same app installed, anyway. However, what about the phone number of your doctor, your therapist, etc.? Do you really want to provide that information to everyone asking? Often, the mere presence of that contact on your phone is enough to deduce a lot about your health, preferences and behavior.
Right now, the app simply offers you the typical functionalities of a contacts app without sharing its contacts with any other app. If an app has the permission to access the phone's contacts, it will not get those stored in Private Contacts anyway.
The app supports caller-detection, displaying a notification if a known contact is calling you. Unfortunately, that depends heavily on manufacturer and Android version. For that reason it is not 100% reliable yet (feedback is very welcome).
Additional features
- Displaying & editing the normal contacts of the phone.
- Moving contacts from the standard Android database to the app (and removing them from the standard database so they are no longer visible to other apps)
- Creating new contacts in the standard Android database
- Moving contacts from Private Contacts back the the standard Android contact database (in case that is desired)
- Support of Imports/Exports in vcf format
- Protecting the app with biometric prompt
- Support of additional features of a contact app
- Profile images
- Mark contacts as favorites
- Add contacts to groups/labels
- Improvements of caller detection
- Maybe an additional category of "Anonymized" contacts which are shared with other apps but under an alias.
- Encryption and password protection
- Suggestions are always welcome...
- What we would like to do is provide contacts to e.g. the official phone-app while withholding them from e.g. WhatsApp. Unfortunately, Android does not allow this: we cannot provide a contact to some apps but not to others.
- Either a contact is in the public contact-database where every app with the necessary permission can read it;
- or it is secret and no app (other) can read it.
- Both Google and phone manufacturers like Samsung tightly restrict call-detection (i.e. reacting to an incoming call by e.g. showing a popup). This is good because it improves our privacy. Unfortunately, it also restricts what we can do within this app. We try to detect incoming calls and show notifications but the corresponding logic changes with every version of Android and may also vary between phone manufacturers. Therefore, the detection-feature can be a bit flaky and may not work reliably on your device. We are sorry for the inconvenience and happy about feedback (e.g. on which devices it does not work or also technical suggestions for improving it).
| Start Screen | Contact Details | Contact Edit 1 | Contact Edit 2 |
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(this is a non-complete list of the most important libraries used; please consult the build.gradle for the complete list)
- "Jetpack Compose" by Google for the UI: https://developer.android.com/jetpack/compose
- "Contact Store" by Alex Styl for accessing the contacts: https://github.com/alexstyl/contactstore
- "libaddressinput" by Google for formatting addresses: https://github.com/google/libaddressinput
- Florian Gubler
- [email protected]
- App entry in Google Play Store: PrivateContacts