Google Contacts could soon let you control clutter from third-party apps (APK teardown)
TL;DR Google Contacts could soon allow users to show or hide read-only contacts synced from connected apps.
The new feature aims to help users troubleshoot issues like duplicated contacts by revealing otherwise hidden view-only entries.
Most users likely won't need this enabled, but the switch offers better visibility for those who occasionally need it.
Google Contacts is in the limelight for the new Pixel VIPs widget, but Google has other features in the pipeline. Google Contacts v4.57.27 includes code for showing and hiding read-only contacts that are provisioned through connected apps. We managed to enable the feature early to give you an early look.
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An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
As Google mentions in the popup dialog for the settings we managed to activate:
You may have view-only contacts from other apps that aren't shown by default. You can show them to help you troubleshoot issues like duplicates.
The first two screenshots show the upcoming option, while the last screenshot shows you what a view-only contact from a connected app looks like.
For the most part, users are best served by hiding view-only contacts from other apps, giving them a cleaner Google Contacts experience. Most apps that provide such view-only contacts often have their own discovery mechanisms, like WhatsApp and Telegram, which provide a list of your contacts present on the service. Displaying that information again in Contacts provides very little value, but it may be useful for troubleshooting, which is what this change is intended for.
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