Apps want too much of your personal data, and it’s the job of your mobile operating system to prevent them from getting it without permission. Deciding whether to grant data permissions to Android apps is hardly a choice, though. Some apps won’t work until you authorize the necessary data and privacy permissions required. Granular permissions managers on Android are still few and far between — if you need to share a single contact record with an app in Android 16, you must give that app access to all of your contacts.
Android 17 is about to change that in a major way. You’ve probably encountered Android’s system-wide Photo Picker, introduced in Android 13, that lets you grant apps access to individual photos or videos instead of handing everything over. Android 17 will apply the same user interface, and the privacy protections that come with it, to contact sharing. The Contact Picker will give you complete control over which contacts your phone shares with apps, and it can’t come soon enough.
If you grant contact sharing permissions to an app, it gets access to everything
Think about all the data stored in your contacts — names, phone numbers, emails, addresses, photos, and notes. The most important contact information for your friends and family is stored on your Android phone, and will be handed over to apps that request it with a single button press. Neither the app nor the user can specify exactly which contact fields or records are shared when permission is granted. It’s an unfortunate limitation, because if you need to provide app access to just one contact stored on your Android phone, you must allow access to every single one of your contacts.
This is because Android app developers use the READ_CONTACTS permission to request access to a user’s device contacts. As Google admits on the Android Developers Blog, “while functional, this approach often granted apps more data than necessary.” When an app requests access to “Contacts and accounts” records on an Android phone, users can only choose between Allow or Don’t allow. There’s no room for anything in between — it’s all or nothing. This leads Android users to hand over their entire contact library, and all the sensitive data stored within, to third-party apps.
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Granular contact sharing for Android apps is long overdue — and a privacy win
Android 17 replaces the wide-ranging READ_CONTACTS permission with a granular Intent.ACTION_PICK_CONTACTS intent. If you’re not an Android app developer, here’s what you need to know: Android 17 introduces a new Contact Picker with a fresh user interface that is “standardized, secure, and searchable” to protect your privacy. Instead of granting apps access to every contact in your library, you can select individual contact records to share with apps.
The new Contact Picker includes a search bar for easy contact discovery and selection. It supports selecting one or multiple contacts at a time for easy grouped sharing, and it offers a Preview button that displays all the contacts you’ve selected. When a user is finished picking contacts to share with an app, they can hit Done in the Android 17 Contact Picker to provide temporary access to only the specified records. Apps can save the contact records to their app data, but read access to your Android phone’s contact library is time-limited. All of these changes give Android users full control of their contact privacy, as they will finally be able to decide which contact records an app can see.
Android 17 also gives developers more control over which data they request from users. Currently, app developers can only ask for every contact field in every contact record stored in an Android phone’s contact library. Following the Android 17 update, developers will be able to request specific data fields — like phone numbers or email addresses — instead of asking for everything. Google recommends that app developers only ask for the data fields required for their app to avoid requesting unnecessary information, although I wish Android 17 also gave the user control over which fields are shared.
Another notable upgrade allows the Contact Picker to find records stored in separate Android profiles, cloned profiles, and private spaces. Put it all together, and the Contact Picker in Android 17 is the biggest contact-sharing upgrade to Android in years.
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Taking inspiration from the Android Photo Picker
Why isn’t granting permissions for everything this specific and private?
If this all sounds familiar, it should. The Contact Picker draws clear inspiration from the Photo Picker, which you’ve probably already used to grant apps limited access to specific photos and videos you select. Since the Photo Picker was introduced roughly four years ago, it’s hard to believe we ever gave apps unrestricted access to the tens of thousands of photos and videos stored in our Android phone galleries. I almost never grant apps full access to my entire Android media library, because why would I? Using the Photo Picker is more private and secure.
We’ll probably say the same about the Contact Picker coming to Android 17 in a few years. It’s an obvious solution to the problem of Android apps requesting and receiving access to more personal user data than they truly need. Currently, Android 17 is in the beta-testing phase, and looks poised for an early Summer release. That’s when you’ll be able to try the Contact Picker for the first time.
- Brand
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Google
- SoC
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Tensor G5
- Display
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6.3″ Actua display
- RAM
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12 GB
- Storage
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128 GB, 256 GB
- Battery
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4970 mAh
Google’s flagship smartphone, the Google Pixel 10 features the Tensor G5 processor, an outstanding triple-camera system, and seven years of software updates. It’ll get the Android 17 public beta, including the upcoming Contact Picker, before every other Android phone.
