In the documentation for the Contact Provider Extension contact provider it says
Use the Contact Provider framework if your app manages its own contacts and wants to make them available in other apps that use the Contacts framework.
But how does an app manage its own contacts? What needs to be done differently if it manages its own contacts versus managing a user's contacts? Does the user still need to grant contacts access for example?
Is there a special group/domain that should be used (how) to add app contacts?
There's no mention of any of this that I can see in the documentation for CNContact or CNContactStore.
You’ve misunderstood the “contacts” in “manages its own contacts”. This is not referring to instances of CNContact
, but to contacts in a more general sense.
Imagine you’re building an app for a popular Internet-wide email service. Your email service has an address book feature, and your users might have lots of useful contact information in that address book. A Contact Provider allows you to make that information available to all apps on iOS via the standard Contacts framework APIs.
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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
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