Solved 3CX ver. 16.1.0.41 - Contacts bug?

[PerryL]

Hi there,

I just updated my 3CX app on my Galaxy S7 Edge (android version 8.0.0).
Everytime when i hit the button "contacts", it keep pushing me to add my contacts into the app

Before the update, there was a option "do not show this again". Is this a bug or how can we avoid this?
Our clients don't want to add their private contacts into the app.

 

[JohnS_3CX]

Hi Perry,

It is asking for permission to read your contacts so it can display them in the app locally on that phone only. The contacts are not going to leave the phone so I don't think it should not be a problem for the users (or a privacy concern).

The "do not show this again" box is displayed by the Android OS, not the app. You can click deny but the app will ask you every time, if you press not now it will only show the 3CX contacts

 

[PerryL]

Hi Perry,

It is asking for permission to read your contacts so it can display them in the app locally on that phone only. The contacts are not going to leave the phone so I don't think it should not be a problem for the users (or a privacy concern).

The "do not show this again" box is displayed by the Android OS, not the app. You can click deny but the app will ask you every time, if you press not now it will only show the 3CX contacts

Hi John,

Thanks for the fast reply.

I understand. It's not really a privacy concern but i don't see the addition why the app needs my phone contacts? You don't want to call (private) phone contacts with the app because it will show the company number to the receiver. Non of the private contacts needs to see the company phone number. People will call back to this number, which is not eligible.

Maybe it's possible to hide or disable the contacts button in My3CX? This would help a lot because after the update it is more logical to use the "status" button for internal calls.

The "do not show this again" message disapeared after updating the 3CX app. The android OS is still the same as before the update, which indicated to me as an app feature.

Maybe i'm totally wrong about this simple way of thinking?

 

[Lakes]

I'll be using the app on my personal phone and I'd like to keep my (personal) contacts separate from the business ones which will be in my 3cx contacts so it would be good to be able to dismiss the prompt once and for all.
Less of an issue where a user has a mobile device issued by the business for business.

 

[nb]

I'll be using the app on my personal phone and I'd like to keep my (personal) contacts separate from the business ones which will be in my 3cx contacts so it would be good to be able to dismiss the prompt once and for all.
Less of an issue where a user has a mobile device issued by the business for business.

Lakes and others reasoning the same. To let you know how this test is made, we assume that if you installed the app on your phone, A phone and contacts is like a fork and knife.
Then automatically you would need to access the contacts.
Now users are denying access to contacts. What can I say.. They want to eat with the fork only??? You will have trouble eating.. You can, but you will have trouble. This is what you will have with the app.

Users claim they want to keep personal contacts separate..We just READ CONTACTS. So we ask permission from android to read personal contacts and ask android to WRITE contacts created. We cannot EDIT a personal contact from the app.
If you are concerned about your contacts, do not worry - Google, the play store, bots and analytics have everything about you already. little 3CX App should be the least of your worries

Does this help you guys to just press allow on contacts and lets move on with more serious issues?

Who reasons like this will have issues ALL OVER the app - in chat, in images, in store - even to generate a log file you will cry.

Yes when you go on contacts it will ask you again and again and again. Because the app is not designed and not tested to not work with contacts.read.

 

[Kellermeister]

I don't have an issue with allowing the apps to read my contacts.

But what we need is an option do filter the contacts from the 3cx-contacts from our phone-contacts.

If the 3cx-contacts and the (private) phone-contacts get intermixed it's very hard to find the contact of a person you don't know exactly. That's what phonebooks are for: you browse the list to find the guy you need. If all private contacts are intermixed it's really hard to browse the 3cx-contactlist.

And furthermore: your answer was really not appropiate. It was a cover-my-ass-answer: not getting the need of the people actually using the app for the sake of "not having it tested". Apologize and start testing.

 

[PerryL]

This is exactly the problem!

It has absolutely nothing to do with our privacy or being concerned about my contacts. It is simply unnecessary to import my contacts because it contaminates the contact list and makes it difficult to search. Why would you import contacts if you don't use them with 3CX? Is this so hard to understand?



As mentioned earlier, your reaction really doesn't make any sense. Are you facing some personal issue's with this kind of reaction? We all want the best experience with the app and we give normal feedback, but parently you can't handle any form of feedback. Do some research in usability before you update an app without testing it!

 

[nb]

Hi guys - in all honesty I do have a little personal attitude at a user that denies contacts or things the app requests.

On the other hand, Yes Apologies for my tone - you also need to understand the state we are in now.
We release an app, and we have lots of things to do. So right now A user that installs a PHONE app and denies access to contacts (which are synonymous yes with calling apps) is like a user who installs the new version of windows, discovers "boot.ini" and says hmmmmm.. this looks useless -- I don't like this - let me delete it.
Then the user restarts the machine and complains that windows is looping on ntldr missing ctrl alt delete to restart computer .. yes for me this is the same. Or I would classify the actions in the same basket.

One more thing - because now we are going into testing.. and that we need to test better.
Also android permissions are not as clear and straight forward as you might think they are. There are internals that require contacts because the Developers of the SDK (so not 3CX yes but its a development layer at Google level) assumed that a calling app MIGHT REMOTELY NEED TO CALL YOUR EXISTING USERS... So I can deny contact read permission but right now but if we do that literally, we might be denying other sub permissions children of contacts, that the app needs. So we need more time to make this granular and test this part really well. Please allow this for now, until we fix this part properly and test it properly. Yes of course we did not test this properly. We assumed like the sdk developers. Clearly we are both a bit wrong agreed. But then only a minority of users will do this.

And no, I do not agree that I have to test the app in this regressive manner and delay a release of it for all the other normal users that have no problem allowing contacts. Why should I do this?

Now lets go back to the app and I have some proposals to make it better

A) The permission comes up, and if you deny, it doesnt come up again.
B) Maybe we make a filter - 3CX Contacts, Android Contacts. All.

What do you guys think? Yes I value your opinion - of course I do - this is why am here.. But we can discuss - its okay..

 

[dcook1313]

Someone pointed me to this thread. We are having a similar issue, when 3CX updated it added every contact he had, email clients etc... He gave it permission to access contacts, but I think he was expecting it to only access the contact that were previously being used. He wants his contacts in 3CX but just the ones he had before, not every contact record he has.
Also he found last night that the option to exit in the menu is gone. He manually shut down the app, but it wakes up if anyone calls. He needs to know how to completely shut down the app so incoming calls do not wake it up.
About your question above. Personally an option to choose which contacts to include for the app would work for us.
Now he really just wants a way to actually shut it off when he doesn't want the app on.

 

[nb]

Exit without push - try this approach - we are discussing this problem in numerous threads
https://www.3cx.com/community/threa...-new-3cx-android-app.68494/page-3#post-299133
Contacts -
The permission for contactrrs just reads tghe contacts from android.
So it gets a collection of PBX Contacts (rights based) and displays them together with android contacts. thats all we do.

He wants his contacts in 3CX but just the ones he had before, not every contact record he has - what does this mean? How should the app know what contact was before or not?

Quedstion is simple -= when your user clicks on contacts, what does he want to see?
You can have 2 types of contacts - the android contacts (which are bound to google addresses and sim) OR 3CX contacts (2CX Company and personal contacts)

What do we need to see?
We have 3 options
ALL
Only 3CX Contacts?
Only Android contacts?

I think these 3. Put forth your ideas in point form.. short and we are monitoring 24/7 for time being.

Now back to the problem of denying access to contacts, and prompting again for contact rights..
Guess what - i did this with Whats app. Whats app with +billion users decided that if you do not allow contacts, they prompt you again. Because it is vital for the app. So allow for now.. Because permissions are vital for the app.

We will decide on how to filter contacts later

 

[dcook1313]

He wants his contacts in 3CX but just the ones he had before, not every contact record he has - what does this mean? How should the app know what contact was before or not? -
don't know how to say it any plainer, but it doesn't work right the way its working now. This person only wants the contacts he had in the 3CX app before not every contact he has ever had including just email addresses.
Also just tried the "Silent" setting, this does not work. the phone still rings.
How do you turn this app off so it will not wake up by itself and ring the phone?

If we get a vote, I vote for including only the original 3CX contacts and if they want more they can add them manually.
We also need a way to actually completely turn off the application.

 

[Kellermeister]

hi nb,

thx for getting back on track.

From what I get feedback from my customers: the permission is not an issue, everybody is used to allow some app permissions all the time without knowing what's going to happen.

The issue is with the contacts list. In V15 the solution for disabling the phone-contacts was to deny the app the permission. This hack is not working anymore. ok.

You are considering an alternative: also ok, we understand it will take some time. But this is not a permission-afraid-yogurt-eater-issue that you can postpone for long: this is a real world problem: the user needs to be able to filter the contacts.

Those 3 Options will do fine:
ALL
Only 3CX Contacts
Only Android contacts

Fun fact: the Status list gives you all extensions (but not all numbers and not the contacts) - but the statuslist is not sorted in a useable way (for europe at least), it's sorted by firstname only. the corporate customers here in europe mostly dont know the firstnames, they are on a lastname basis.

so in the status list we need an option to sort:
firstname
lastname
extension (yes, i know them by number better than by name)

and basically we need the same option in the contactlist to sort by:
firstname
lastname

Consider furthermore to filter the contacts that are not reachable, like email-only-contacts Those contacts are useless for setting up a call, so don't clutter the conctactlist with them.

br

 

[nb]

hi nb,

thx for getting back on track.

From what I get feedback from my customers: the permission is not an issue, everybody is used to allow some app permissions all the time without knowing what's going to happen.

The issue is with the contacts list. In V15 the solution for disabling the phone-contacts was to deny the app the permission. This hack is not working anymore. ok.

You are considering an alternative: also ok, we understand it will take some time. But this is not a permission-afraid-yogurt-eater-issue that you can postpone for long: this is a real world problem: the user needs to be able to filter the contacts.

Those 3 Options will do fine:
ALL
Only 3CX Contacts
Only Android contacts

Fun fact: the Status list gives you all extensions (but not all numbers and not the contacts) - but the statuslist is not sorted in a useable way (for europe at least), it's sorted by firstname only. the corporate customers here in europe mostly dont know the firstnames, they are on a lastname basis.

so in the status list we need an option to sort:
firstname
lastname
extension (yes, i know them by number better than by name)

and basically we need the same option in the contactlist to sort by:
firstname
lastname

Consider furthermore to filter the contacts that are not reachable, like email-only-contacts Those contacts are useless for setting up a call, so don't clutter the conctactlist with them.

br

Filter on contacts ok - We will make a tab.
Re - The last name and first name are already controlled server side. Set the contacts to be in this way and they will be sent from server to clients in the configured way. It should already be like this.

Contacts > Settings

Phonebook display

Configure how to display company phonebook entries on your IP Phones.
First Name, Last Name
Last Name, First Name

Launch app and you will seer that the sorting is adjusted.

 

[Kellermeister]

you are correct that the conctact-list is sorted thus.
but the statuslist (first tab) is not following this rule. it's always sorted by first name.

 

[nb]

you are correct that the conctact-list is sorted thus.
but the statuslist (first tab) is not following this rule. it's always sorted by first name.

Even the presence is.. If not in the next update it will be.. Exit the app and launch again to see if maybe some caching is playing..

 

[apostolis_3CX]

He wants his contacts in 3CX but just the ones he had before, not every contact record he has - what does this mean? How should the app know what contact was before or not? -
don't know how to say it any plainer, but it doesn't work right the way its working now. This person only wants the contacts he had in the 3CX app before not every contact he has ever had including just email addresses.
Also just tried the "Silent" setting, this does not work. the phone still rings.
How do you turn this app off so it will not wake up by itself and ring the phone?

If we get a vote, I vote for including only the original 3CX contacts and if they want more they can add them manually.
We also need a way to actually completely turn off the application.

Hi,
If you want to list only 3cx contacts in contact page just go to device settings - applications - 3cx client - and switch off permission to native contacts. Just keep in mind that each time you visit contact page on 3cx client you will be asked again to grand permission. Just deny.


As for the later part regarding completely turning off the application i suppose you mean not to wake up the app if PUSH notification is received.
If this is the case you can either deactivate account by long pressing on the active account and submenu with option to de activate appears (images below).






Or even better just set status to DND and make sure PUSH notifications are disabled for status DND.
In the new client user has option to disable PUSH notifications per status. You can find this option in the forwarding Rules.

 

[StefanW]

all information has been collected into one FQA of our new Android APP.

https://www.3cx.com/docs/android-app-faq