Yeah. I'd like it too. I can't use my bank's app, because it wants some weird permissions like an access to contacts, I refuse to give them, because I see no use in it for me, and it refuses to work.

Apps are not allowed to force you to share your contacts on iOS, report any apps that are asking you to do so as it’s a violation of the App Store TOS.

In iOS you can share a subset of your contacts. This is functionally equivalent and works as you described for WhatsApp.

>In iOS you can share a subset of your contacts.

the problem is, the app must respect that.

WhatsApp, for all the hate it gets, does.

"Privacy" focused Telegram doesnt-- it wouldnt work unless I shared ALL my contacts-- when I shared a few, it kept complaining I had to share ALL

Is it something specific to iOS Telegram client?

On Android Telegram works with denied access to the contacts and maintains its own, completely separate, contact list (shared with desktop Telegram and other copies logged in to same account). I'm using Telegram longer than I'm using smartphone and it has completely separate contact list (as it should be).

And WhatsApp cannot be used without access to contacts: it doesn't allow to create WatsApp-only contact and complains that it has no place to store it till you grant access to Phone contact list.

To be honest, I prefer to have separate contact lists on all my communication channel, and even sharing contacts between phone app and e-mail app (GMail) bothers me.

Telegram is good in this aspect, it can use its own contact list, not synchronized or shared with anything else, and WhatsApp is not.

I’ve never allowed Telegram on iOS to access my contacts, camera, or microphone and it’s worked just fine.

Looks to me like it was a bug. Not giving access to any contacts broke the app completely but limited access works fine except for an annoying persistent in app notification.

How does Telegram know that the subset you gave access to isn't ALL the contacts? Seems like iOS should not leak that bit of info to the app.

iOS generally solves this through App Store submission reviews so I’m surprised this isn’t a rule and that telegram got away with it. “Apps must not gate functionality behind receiving access to all contacts vs a subset” or something. They definitely do so for location access, for example.

WhatsApp specifically needs phone numbers, and you can filter out which contacts you share, but not which fields. So if you family uses WhatsApp, you’d share those contacts, but you can’t share ONLY their phone number, WhatsApp also gets their birthdays, addresses, personal notes, and any other personal information which you might have.

I think this feature is pretty meaningless in the way that it’s implemented.

It’s also pretty annoying that applications know they have partial permission, so kept prompting for full permission all the time anyway.

Also for the camera, just feed them random noise or a user-selectable image/video

GrapheneOS has this feature (save for faking GPS) fwiw