According to Cordova, the Contacts plugin is deprecated with no replacement planned. This seems quite alarming to me but I’m not seeing much chatter about it. Notwithstanding their logic, which makes no sense to me, what are the Ionic communities thoughts about what to do about it? Contacts seem a core part of the native experience!
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My take on it.
I’m currently near finished developing an app whose core purpose revolves around contacts. As of now, everything works perfectly. Apparently, the contacts plugin will continue to be accessible and functional going ahead. So there’s no concern at this point.
But, being that there will be no active maintenance on the plugin, what are potential issues that could arise in the future? That’s where I’m a little concerned.
That’s also not just a rhetorical question. I’m curious as to what might actually break the synergy between the plugin and applications that are or will be using it in the future.
For example, maybe Apple decides they no longer want to have an option for ‘organizations’ available for contacts. We, as developers, could / would simply update our application, removing that component from its’ functionality. Solved.
@Sujan12 saw you in that thread
I am no expert but I expect it would keep working until the platform SDKs introduce some kind of breaking change. Hopefully the forthcoming capacitor work (which I just learned about) will be the migration path. But I am no expert…
Surprisingly, Capacitor will still rely on old cordova plugins.
so may not address the Contacts issue then.
I read the link you provided, plus the w3 standards document about the plugin. I’m not fully understanding if the language.
Is the case that only the plugin will no longer be maintained, but applications can still access and manipulate contacts data?
So hypothetically, if I were to create my own contact plugin, it could be used by applications and app stores would still accept that application?
I believe that you say is correct. The plugin will remain available and will work until it breaks, who knows when that may be.
Anyone is free to write their own plugin and maintain it, and I don’t see why app stores would reject on that basis alone.
But as an app developer I would prefer to use officially supported and maintained plugins from known organizations where possible.
Agreed 100%
In the event that it’s not a possibility in the future, an alternative option will clearly be necessary. ALOT of applications include contact access as a major component.
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they should make nativescript plugins work on capacitor… that’ll give us 800 new plugins from 2015-2017.
In my opinion, that’s the easiest solution to this problem…
NativeScript is based on Angular 5 and TypeScript as well… I don’t think it will be too difficult to make nativescript plugin work on capacitor if they try.
It really would / will be nice to have another pool of plugin resources to use in Ionic. Cordova plugins, for the most part, are great, but it looks like it’s time for Cordova to pass the torch.
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It’s been a while since then, but i believe the day has come: contacts is crashing on the latest Android versions.
Any solution for that?
Thank you very much for your answer!
With the latest git’ my app still crashes upon saving.
Same issue here 
using save function crash Android devices in Oreo update