[jeeva]

As a few examples, there are a variety of social-network applications (LinkedIn, Facebook) that request access to your platform specific contacts application. They then do a variety of interesting things with them, such as suggesting users with numbers they have "on file" as potential new "Friends", etc. This is seemingly server-side.

Whatever you're using to sync contacts, without syncing them to this contact app, it seems (to me) as useful as keeping a textfile full of phone numbers in Dropbox. You won't have any useful prompts telling you that it's Dave phoning you, John texting you, or Alice's number to phone/text.

This is, admittedly, neatly worked around by keeping your permission requests under control, but... stuff like this[1], from before the granular permission system on Android was available, are annoying.

1: http://bgr.com/2011/08/12/facebook-stole-every-contact-and-p...

[lorenzhs]

That's not an automatism nor inevitable, though. I don't have either of these apps on my phone. And both iOS and now Android have these dynamic permission dialogs where you can refuse access to your contacts. It may be inconvenient to use a messaging app without granting it access to your contacts, but I think all of them work that way on iOS. Refusing to work without access would be against the iOS guidelines iirc.

But that wasn't the article's concern at all, as you pointed out in another comment.