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by saurik 537 days ago
> I have WhatsApp to talk to some family and I recently disabled allowing all contacts in iOS 18. WhatsApp now has a persistent notification at the top of messages to "Allow All Contacts".

If this is still possible, then Apple fucked up the implementation of this feature, as clearly there should be no way to differentiate not having bothered to fill out a ton of contacts and having limited access for an app to see your contacts; and since this is so obviously easy to do correctly, it frankly sounds actively malicious: there is a set -- probably a very small set -- of engineers and product managers who chose to build this incorrectly, in order to continue to maintain the status quo of the proxy war between Apple and Meta, to our detriment.
4 comments
comex 537 days ago
It’s part of the API:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/contacts/cnauthori...

The documentation for ContactAccessButton suggests only presenting it if you have limited access:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/contactsui/contact...

edit: but that’s intended to be used specifically to respond to a contact search. I don’t use WhatsApp, but a “persistent notification” sounds unrelated to ContactAccessButton.

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jaredklewis 537 days ago
No? For this particular case if the api exposed a bunch of bogus contacts then the WhatsApp app would be displaying and autocompleting non-existent contacts to the user throughout the UI, which would be a horrible UX.

There are cases where you can fake data and cases where you need to be able to block access and the apps should respect that.

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skydhash 536 days ago
> If this is still possible, then Apple fucked up the implementation of this feature, as clearly there should be no way to differentiate not having bothered to fill out a ton of contacts and having limited access for an app to see your contacts

If you only allow a subset of your contact, WhatsApp proceeds to not display contact information for everyone and to disable the whole status feature.

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br0wnr1c3 536 days ago
My assumption was that WhatsApp was heuristically detecting the lack of full contacts access. I figured they looked at the number of contacts to down from a couple hundred (pre-iOS 18) to 5, and assumed I limited access. However, it could totally be a detectable API response to the app as well.
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