I'm doing estimates for a Windows 8 app, and I would like to programatically search the Windows 8 contacts store for a person's name based on their phone number or email address. Is this possible in WinRT/.Net? I can't seem to find documentation for an API to do this.
You can't do that per se. If you want to access the contacts locally, you have to use the Contact Picker Contract. That will bring up the People hub and let the user select one or more contacts that you can then operate on. If you want to search the user's contacts, you have to use the Live Connect APIs. Check out the Interactive SDK and this video from Build.
Related
Currently, I am using WhatsApp Business api cloud on one of my web project, I would like to register a customer's phone number but via api instead through meta, developer platform like following:
"Here is the image to register customer's number in the meta developer platform"
I want do this:
(managing the phone numbers)
but via api, and later of that send the verification code via api as well.
If someone can help me , telling me if that is possible and sharing documentation or the endpoint I would appreciate it very much, I've been looking at the documentation and postman's examples for 2 days without any success.
I'm sorry I didn't share the pictures directly, it is my first question on Stackoverflow
Thanks in advance,
Greetings!
I guess you are using WhatsApp provided a test phone number in From, you need to read this, https://developers.facebook.com/docs/whatsapp/cloud-api/get-started#sent-test-message
Enter the recipient phone number you would like to message in the To field. Ensure the number is correct, and that you want to add it to your list of 5 possible message recipients —as you add phone numbers, follow the prompts on the screen to verify you have access to them. Once this number has been added, it cannot be removed from your list.
Note: This limitation is only for WhatsApp-provided test phone numbers. Real phone numbers that you register do not have a limit on the number of recipients.
You don't need to register receivers' phone numbers if you are using your own real business phone number in the sender's phone number.
I am trying to implement a feature in my app, where users can see a contact list of which contacts (based on mobile number) already has an account on our app.
This feature can be found in all social media and banking apps.
Can someone guide on how to do so?
You can use https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-native-contacts to get all the contact details, then pass this array to your backend service to find the accounts with the phone number, then you can display them.
Does Google's SMS Retriever API get the list of phone numbers from the SIM lines on the user's device (which means that it's similar to TelephonyManager), or from the user's Google Play account?
I'm the product manager at Google for this API. Yes, as of the latest version of Play Services, the Phone Selector shows both the phone number for the device from the TelephonyManager (if it can be parsed as as a valid phone number) as well as recent phone numbers for the active Google Accounts on the device.
This is not directly addressed from the docs but if we infer from this statement in the Obtain the user's phone number:
Often, it is the best user experience to use the hint picker to prompt
the user to choose from the phone numbers stored on the device and
thereby avoid having to manually type a phone number
we can deduce that SMS Retriever API gets the contacts from your device.
Update
Please look at #Steven Soneff's answer
The numbers are retrieved from Smart Lock for Passwords on Android. They are retrieved if the user already stored it using Smart Lock else they will be empty. You may also ask the user to store the number for future use-cases using Smart Lock for Passwords.
Imagine an iphone app that automatically registers users on the first start according to their phone identity (e.g. phone number*) on a server database.
Afterwards, users should see which of their friends already use the app, i.e. which of their contacts are registered on the DB.
An obvious solution would be to always send a select-request to the DB containing all of the users contacts, everytime the user refreshs his or her friend list. As a result, the user retrieves the list of their registered contacts (friends).
Is there any better way to realize this synchronization between the user management on the server and the contacts in the user's address book. Sending multiple select-requests (each user for every refresh) with dozens of phone numbers might not be performant at all.
Example:
WhatsApp is actually a good example for this scenario. You can add new contacts to your address book and WhatsApp automatically refreshs your WhatsApp friend list according to your phone book. I really like this idea because the user don't need to create an account manually.
*I know about the problems of using phone numbers in AppStore apps, so this question really focusses on the architectural problem.
EDIT
this comment (Whatsapp contacts syncronization) describes the mentioned simple approach. but is this really the smartest way?
I'm working on a Win8 metro signup flow and would like to be able to seamlessly pull, using the user-provided phone #, a photo and display name from the built-in "People" app. I'm having trouble finding documentation/code outside of ContactPicker (which isn't what I need).
Couple questions:
Is there an API to pull contact data that would be present in the "People" app?
If so, is there a way to configure capabilities to avoid interrupting the user with a modal "Ok for app xyz to access your address book"?
Thanks.
Confirmed that there is no API to pull contacts programmatically.
You can't pull contacts without permission, it's a security feature. You CAN interrogate the contact data users pick via the Contact Picker though.
You therefore have to ask the user to pick contacts relevant to your task, call the single / multiple contact picker then once picked, you can interrogate the contacts as much as you want. They have phone numbers, emails, locations all the data you might want hanging off those.
As far as I can tell, there's no way to maintain a persistent link to them though, so store that data while you can.