Wanted Apps: Contact Sharing

One of my main blockers to using Firefox OS as my main phone system right now is that I didn't yet manage to get all my contacts over to my Firefox OS phones, with neither of the versions I tested. One variant that has applications far beyond initial import is contact sharing via Bluetooth.

It would be great if I could send contacts back and forth between all my devices, including the Firefox OS ones. Other phones usually can send and receive contacts in VCard (.vcf) format via Bluetooth, but Firefox OS so far is missing this functionality (even though some VCard support exists for import from SD card in 1.1, though I could never get that to work for me).

A reasonably usable implementation for sharing could be implemented as an app: It would need to read from the Contacts API, present a selection to the user, assemble VCard files and send those off via a Web Activity so the existing Bluetooth sharing can act on them. With that, the sending side should work.
The receiving side would be a bit more hacky, but also doable: Unfortunately, the existing Bluetooth support does not call a Web Activity for handling not explicitely supported file types, it only ends up saving them on the SD card. So the contact sharing app would need to periodically look for new VCard files in that location, read and offer to import them, and finally use the Contacts API again to write them into the system's database.

If someone would pick up the needed work there, I'm sure the app would be quite popular, and I'd love to use it myself. Ultimately, I think this functionality should be part of the official Contacts apps, so having any such app available under a licence that allows Gaia to use the code would be great. Still, I think it would be awesome to have the app so the soon-shipping Firefox-OS-1.0.1-powered devices can use them.

(This post was written and published from a Firefox OS test device.)