- Android apps that get permission to change your contacts can currently access all of them.
- Google’s interested in limiting that with a system that distinguishes between individual and bulk edits.
- The first components are arriving with Android 17 QPR2 later this year.
Keeping Android users safe is one of the most challenging problems Google faces with its mobile operating system, and one of the many ways it’s managed to address the task is through the development of Android’s permission system. By only granting apps a narrow set of permissions that they truly need, we can limit the ability of secretly malicious or otherwise compromised apps to do harm. Today we’re leaning about an update to how permissions work when it comes to contacts, and why Google’s making the change.
Over on X, Google’s Mishaal Rahman is highlighting some upcoming changes for how apps are allowed to manage our contacts on Android, further detailed in a developer blog post. Right now, the problem is that contacts permissions aren’t granular enough — an app that just wants to add or update one contact gets the same WRITE_CONTACTS permission that an app that wanted to change all of your contacts would.