>iOS18 finally does what should have been done all along: ability to tell the app it has access to contacts while not actually giving it access to the entire list.
This seems like a mis-feature to me. iOS shouldn't be lying to apps like this. If an app shouldn't have access to all your contacts (which it shouldn't), then why is Apple approving such an app in the first place? I thought the whole selling point for iOS was the strictly controlled and curated app store.
Example: WhatsApp needs to show a name for a given number who messaged you. It might be in your contacts. So you need an api to look up a contact by number. Or you want to send a message and want to send to a contact, so you need at least an api to pick a contact. The latter is easy. The former is harder. Phone numbers are slow. Enumerating the space to leak your entire contacts list is trivial. Thus a lookup by number api cannot be. And thus instead we end up with "share partial contact list" as the best case, IMHO
This seems like a mis-feature to me. iOS shouldn't be lying to apps like this. If an app shouldn't have access to all your contacts (which it shouldn't), then why is Apple approving such an app in the first place? I thought the whole selling point for iOS was the strictly controlled and curated app store.