How to Quickly Fetch User Contacts in React Native

How to Quickly Fetch User Contacts in React Native

Contacts play a crucial role in the digital world, whether it's making phone calls or finding friends on social media. On a smartphone, the bulky and cumbersome phone number book of yesteryear is now a compact list. Telephone numbers, email addresses, and other contact information are all unique to each individual.

We'll look at React Native Contacts, a powerful contacts component that lets you use your React Native app to fetch, update, and add new contacts. We'll also go over a similar Expo module.

You should be familiar with the fundamentals of React Native and Expo, including JSX, class and functional components, and styling, in order to follow along.

This guide assumes that you have already completed the app's basic setup.

In React Native, you can fetch the user’s contacts by using the react-native-contacts library. This library provides an easy-to-use API for accessing the device's contact list.

To install the library, you can use the following command:

npm install react-native-contacts

or

yarn add react-native-contacts

After installing the library, you will need to link it to your project. You can do this by running the following command:

react-native link react-native-contacts

Once the library is linked, you can use the getAll method to fetch all of the user's contacts:

import Contacts from 'react-native-contacts'; 
Contacts.getAll((err, contacts) => { 
if(err === 'denied'){ 
} 
else { 
  console.log(contacts); 
} });

You may need to request permission from the user to access their contacts, this is usually done by using react-native-permissions library.

You can use the request method to request permission:

import Permissions from 'react-native-permissions'; 
Permissions.request('contacts').then(response => {
 // response is one of: 'authorized', 'denied', 'restricted', or 'undetermined' 
if(response === 'authorized'){ 
// fetch contacts }
});

It’s important to note that the getAll method will return all the user's contacts, including their name, phone numbers, and email addresses. You may want to filter this data before displaying it in your app.

Also, it’s important to keep in mind that user’s privacy is important and you should always be transparent about why you are requesting access to user’s contact list and how you are using the data.

Conclusion

In conclusion, React Native Contacts and Expo Contacts are excellent tools for retrieving and modifying a user's device's contacts.
We went over how to get contacts from a bare and Expo React Native app in this tutorial. To play with contacts in your bare React Native app, I would suggest giving the expo-contacts module of Expo modules a try if you want to investigate additional options.