android - How to show&handle contact details intents of apps?

Question

Background

Not sure how it's called, but when you open the contact-details screen of the contacts app, you see various apps there that you can click to perform actions on (such as calling and sending messages via Viber and WhatsApp) as such:

The problem

I don't know how those actions are called, so I can't find out how to investigate them. I tried searching for each social network, how to use it, but this seems like a lot of effort that might not even work well in the future.

I wish to query those actions, show them, and handle them, for all of the apps that are shown on the native contacts app.

What I've tried

I tried to investigate the intents that are being used, and found that for Viber, this is what can be used for messages:

    intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, Uri.parse("content://com.android.contacts/data/"+id));
    intent.setPackage("com.viber.voip");

However, I don't know what this "id" is, only that it works because I've tested it with real data. I also tried to actually print all of the contacts database, to find the correct value to use (and the mapping), but I didn't find it.

Also, I can't find how this information should have been found. My guess is that it should probably include a query of the available mimetypes, and check them on the specified contact (probably using contact id).

The question

Given a contact (id or phone number), how can I show and perform the operation as shown on contact-details screen of the contacts app ?

Answer 1

If you query for all that contact's info from the ContactsContract.Data.CONTENT_URI table, and dump it to log, you'll see raw-contacts in accounts like com.whatsapp or com.viber, that have data rows with mimetypes that begin with vnd.android.cursor.item.

For example a Whatsapp Data row might look like this:

_id: 247
account_type: com.whatsapp
mimetype: vnd.android.cursor.item/vnd.com.whatsapp.profile
display_name: Bob
raw_contact_id: 62
data1: [email protected]
data2: WhatsApp
data3: Message +1 123-456-789
// other info ...

So when your code sees such Data rows, it should display to the user the app icon of the app com.whatsapp (account_type) with the text Message +1 123-456-789 (data3) and you can also display other info like app name Whatsapp (data2).

When that action is clicked, you need to create an intent like this:

Uri uri = ContentUris.withAppendedId(Data.CONTENT_URI, 247);
Intent i = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, uri);
i.setType("vnd.android.cursor.item/vnd.com.whatsapp.profile");

The app should have an Activity that registered to that mimetype, that will query the Data.CONTENT_URI table for the 247 row-id, get the profile id from data1 and perform the action requested.

The specific fields (which one is the visible text, etc.) are defined in a ContactsDataKind object in the app, but it's not that easily read by external apps, but in my experience most such apps use the same fields for the same behavior (e.g. data3 is the user displayed action text)

P.S.
To get the resource of an app that is not yours, you can use this:

Drawable icon = getPackageManager().getApplicationIcon( PACKAGE_NAME );

EDIT

Each app that syncs contacts and wish to be presented by Contacts apps with app-specific actions will need to create a contacts.xml file under res/xml/contacts.xml that app needs to be accessible via getPackageManager() (or other means) so the contact presenting app will be able to read it and recognize the app's specific MIMETYPES and field mappings.

For example, Whatsapp contacts.xml looks like this:

<ContactsSource
  xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
    <ContactsDataKind android:icon="@mipmap/icon" android:mimeType="vnd.android.cursor.item/vnd.com.whatsapp.profile" android:summaryColumn="data2" android:detailColumn="data3" android:detailSocialSummary="true" />
    <ContactsDataKind android:icon="@mipmap/icon" android:mimeType="vnd.android.cursor.item/vnd.com.whatsapp.voip.call" android:summaryColumn="data2" android:detailColumn="data3" />
    <ContactsDataKind android:icon="@mipmap/icon" android:mimeType="vnd.android.cursor.item/vnd.com.whatsapp.video.call" android:summaryColumn="data2" android:detailColumn="data3" />
</ContactsSource>

And Google Duo contacts.xml file is:

<ContactsAccountType
  xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
    <ContactsDataKind android:icon="@drawable/product_logo_duo_color_48" android:mimeType="vnd.android.cursor.item/com.google.android.apps.tachyon.phone" android:summaryColumn="data4" android:detailColumn="data5" android:detailSocialSummary="true" />
    <ContactsDataKind android:icon="@drawable/duo_audio_icon_vector" android:mimeType="vnd.android.cursor.item/com.google.android.apps.tachyon.phone.audio" android:summaryColumn="data4" android:detailColumn="data5" android:detailSocialSummary="true" />
</ContactsAccountType>

See official docs here: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/contacts-provider#ContactsFile

However, if you're not planning on supporting EVERY single app in the world, rather just some hand-picked list of apps like Whatsapp / Duo, it would be way easier just to map those fields manually in your app