Accessing Contacts on the iPhone

Expo SDK
1

I am looking for a way to touch a button in my Expo app that will enable me to browse & search through my iPhone contacts. I want to select a single contact and then be able to use that contacts data in my Expo app.

It would be the identical function to creating a new text message in the ‘Messages’ app on the iPhone. You click the ‘+’ icon and it shows you the name of all your contacts.You can scroll and search and eventually touch on one and their name is filled into the ‘To:’ field.

I am not sure if I would have to write the GUI to search, display, scroll and pick a contact (duplicate the functionality seen in the Messages app) or if we could actually get Expo to launch that already existing functionality and somehow tie into it.

I have been unable to find any existing Expo apps that browse contacts on an iPhone.

Thanks guys.

2

Hi there! Expo doesn’t come with a prebuilt Contacts Picker interface. At the moment your best bet would be to implement the UI yourself and use the Contacts API to get the data from the device.

3

Ok thanks Ben.
Not the answer I was hoping for! but hey at least I know what to do next. Thanks

4

Still wondering…are there any Expo demos I can take a look at that access Contacts?

5

The docs have an example of accessing contacts: https://docs.expo.io/versions/latest/sdk/contacts.html#example

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6

Hey jesse,

I am aware of the docs and that code snippet, but I am looking to see a full example where I can see where this method should be placed, a caller calling it and then seeing an alert actually pop up in a demo Expo app.

I tried putting that async method (showFirstContactAsync) from the docs into the HomeScreen.js from the ‘Up and Running’ guide and I cannot get it to work, here is where I am now

https://sketch.expo.io/BkPodr8oe

7

Here’s an example of loading the first contact: https://sketch.expo.io/SkuzWUIje

One note: our contact api isn’t paginated currently so if you have a long list of contacts it can be slow. We’re looking into this soon.

1 Like
8

Thanks Jesse.

I can see a contact now. Much appreciated

1 Like