OpenContacts

This is a text automatically translated from Italian. If you appreciate our work and if you like reading it in your language, consider a donation to allow us to continue doing it and improving it.

One of the biggest requests we receive is to protect your contacts and the own address book. There are some applications that we are somehow forced to use, willy-nilly. This is where it comes to our rescue OpenContacts.

In fact, there are applications such as WhatsApp that can hardly be used without allowing access to the entire address book. No problem except that Whatsapp is owned by Facebook which is also the owner of Instagram. In short, our entire column, installing and using WhatsApp, inevitably ends up in the clutches of Zuckerberg.

Of course, no one forces us and you can choose not to use WhatsApp. The problem arises when certain services they become products par excellence. This is the case, for example, of Google for web searches and of WhatsApp regarding messaging. Some employers create WhatsApp groups and it is difficult to stay out of them. Or the grandmother has struggled to learn to use only WhatsApp and we don't want to force her to learn too Telegram or Signal.

If it is almost impossible to use WhatsApp without being tracked (you can try with Shelter for example, but we have detected some difficulties in daily use) you can at least try not to give them away all our past contacts, present And futures. This applies as much to WhatsApp as to any other application that requires access to our address book to be used.

OpenContacts protects your address book

In fact, OpenContacts entirely replaces your address book on your mobile phone and does not allow any application to access it. In this way then you can decide who and what to give to WhatsApp it's at any other application.
For example, you can decide to leave only the few numbers you talk to on WhatsApp or even in your mobile phone book delete it all, especially if you talk to a few people on WhatsApp who are easily recognizable then profile picture.

OpenContacts Furthermore, it totally replaces your contacts application importing all your contacts is extremely simple. Just go to your address book, do "export" and once you have the .vcf file click on it And open it with OpenContacts. All your contacts will now be isolated from the rest of your phone!

OpenContacts Furthermore, it also replaces the call log and you can also use it to make phone calls directly. It can synchronize with a server CardDAV but it's still in beta and it's not for everyone. But you can easily export the contacts and tell them to do it regularly every week. Then just keep the .vcf in some backups or in cloud and get it back if you have to format everything!

It seems like one to us smart idea to protect your contacts, given the enormous amount of applications that want access to our address book to function. In this way we allow it but they will find the address book empty. Ours, the real one, is somewhere else! ~(^-^)~

One last thing: many times we hear the reasoning "they already have my entire address book anyway“. Okay, that's true. But unless you have decided to end any other social relationship in this way, at least avoid that everyone will also have updates to your address book. It's always a good time to start from scratch!

Suggestion

Several people have asked us for help in searching for names from the address book within the application. In fact, by default the search is not exactly intuitive. You have two possibilities:

• If you only find the numeric keyboard you can see that together with the numbers there are also letters. Press the numbers corresponding to the letter to find the name. For example, if you are looking for Andrea, just write 263732;

• If you want a normal keyboard to appear instead, just go to preferences and disable T9 Search. Thanks to Linduz for this tip.

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