CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidcontactsandroid-contacts
Ken Bellows
Ken Bellows

Reputation: 6942

Android Dev: Is it possible to develop on top of/customize the Contacts App?

This is a pretty niche question, I'm sure, but basically what I'd like to know is whether it's possible for a new app to modify the existing Contacts app in Android. For a (very) simple example, consider an app that allows you to color your girlfriend's contact slot pink, or highlight all of your family members. Simple things like that, to change the appearance of individual contacts.

Note that I do not want to create a new Contacts app. This is obviously possible and has been done. I simply would like to alter, or perhaps customize, the existing native Android Contacts App.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 112

Answers (2)

Aswin Kumar
Aswin Kumar

Reputation: 5278

Actually, there is a small thing you can do. From ICS and up, if you notice, the People app has options to show availability of a particular contact in Skype, gtalk, facebook, etc. This is done by some kind of plugin mechanism, where each "contact provider" (to give it a name) could provide their info to the people app. (Im yet to find out completely how this is done).

What you could do is: create your own application which plugs in to the people app (like what skype, gtalk, fb, etc does) and give the status "online" to your selected contacts. Maybe you can even set some status message for these contacts (you can see G+ statuses on your contacts, so it should be possible). Not exactly as fancy as what you wanted to do, but somewhere there.

Upvotes: 1

Todd Davies
Todd Davies

Reputation: 5522

Nope, unfortunately, if you want to change how the user accesses their contacts, you'll have to create your own app. There's no way to build upon Android's existing default contacts app.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions