Can't use "People" with people not in Contacts

[dancojocaru2000]

Hey there!

I am noticing that Unigram only syncs people who's contacts I already have added in Windows' contacts (or those with phone number, can't precisely figure out).

Therefore, most people who I only have added by their username cannot be added in "People" in the task bar.

Can this be solved?

[FrayxRulez]

You can’t add users as contacts by only using their usernames on Telegram, you need to save their phone numbers to. Therefore this is the intended behavior.

[dancojocaru2000]

Pretty oddly designed intended behavior.

As an example, Quarrel, an UWP Discord client, syncs all Discord friends with Windows contacts so I can use them in the People bar.

Why can't Unigram do the same with people using only usernames too, based on them being in the chats list?

[FrayxRulez]

Because as I said those aren’t your friends, they are just people you chat with. They aren’t in your Telegram contacts list, consequently they can’t be synced with your Windows contacts.

[FrayxRulez]

Chat list isn’t designed to be synced, you might have 5000 chats, but just a few of them loaded into the app.

Contacts instead are technically designed to be synced locally.

[dancojocaru2000]

The problem is that there is no mechanism to add people to Telegram contacts based on their username. I don't want to share my phone number with everybody. (You can doubt my definition of friends based on this 🤷‍♂).

Is there any place to bring this up to Telegram?

[FrayxRulez]

I was just referring to the technical definition of friends 😊

I’m quite sure a lot of people reported this to Telegram and that they’re aware of this. You can still try to reach them out on Twitter.

[dancojocaru2000]

There's one thing being aware, there's another doing something about it.

It seems like such a simple thing yet Telegram is almost never transparent about things. They just pop up around once a month and "Hey, look, we did stuff!". There's no real way to reach them like a ticket system or something like that. It's quite frustrating at times.

[FrayxRulez]

I’m not sure a ticket is the right place where to discuss about this, but I believe this is simply how big services work, at least judging from my professional experience.

[dancojocaru2000]

Not really. I personally don't like Discord as a company but they have support and a feature request page where users upvote ideas and stuff. It's not that uncommon to find these days.

[dancojocaru2000]

I mean, don't get me wrong, many services don't. But wasn't Telegram supposed to be the different one? The one that doesn't act like all the other corporations do?

[MarcAnt01]

You are off topic, talking about a general topic in the ticket of an unofficial client. To ping them, reach out to them on Twitter.

[ivucica]

Can this be reopened @MarcAnt01 @FrayxRulez?

Since Telegram has a concept of an addressbook that doesn't require uploading all my contacts, I've added about 10 people to this addressbook. These are the only contacts that Telegram backend is aware I have.

Right now I'm blocking Unigram from all access to contacts so it doesn't actually upload the contacts to Telegram backends. (Same applies to 'official' Telegram apps on iOS and Android.)

I'd like to use Unigram with My People integration, without uploading all Windows contacts into Telegram. Can something be done to expose Telegram's addressbook to Windows -- but to also not pull in contacts from Windows into Telegram?

[ivucica]

Friendly ping @MarcAnt01 @FrayxRulez. Telegram is one of the rare modern IM clients I use, and deeper integration of its phone number-based addressbook (the one that all clients -- including Unigram -- are aware of) into Windows would be great.

Syncing is not something I want to do. All contacts I want Telegram to be aware of have manually been added to its addressbook using the Android client.

Note, this people-integration-without-syncing is not the same as 'adding a person to addressbook by username' (I mentioned this in #1202 (comment), on an issue which was closed).

[MarcAnt01]

Well, again it’s not thought to be used with non-contacts (Windows ones). Anyway nowadays Telegram added the possibility to add people to Telegram contacts so maybe @FrayxRulez could consider reopening this issue, but I highly doubt

[ivucica]

I do want to merge Telegram addressbook contacts with my Windows addressbook contacts -- I just don't want to upload the entire Windows addressbook to Telegram.

Because the Windows addressbook is my Google addressbook, and contains 1000+ contacts.

The reason I use Telegram is because it maintains its own addressbook and doesn't require uploading every contact. @FrayxRulez please reconsider opening this :-)

FWIW, I wouldn't know where to begin looking to address this as a PR, as I'm not a .Net or UWP developer. Getting into this would be opening a whole new can of worms for me. Even so, this issue being closed would signal to me that this would be an unwanted feature? @FrayxRulez would you accept a PR for contacts integration without uploading contacts onto Telegram?

[ivucica]

Here's my layman view:

A quick look at https://github.com/UnigramDev/Unigram/blob/8a59afec7dcdfc271fe05161149b907fa6b9bd1f/Unigram/Unigram/Services/ContactsService.cs tells me that a reason why the export happens is so that Microsoft-generated ID for a contact gets the x_user_data_account and x_contact_list attributes set. Are these uploaded? I can't tell.

Assuming that Telegram's built-in addressbook phone numbers are visible to TDLib-using software, it's probably possible to produce an intersection of the set of contacts in Windows.ApplicationModel.Contacts.ContactList and Windows.ApplicationModel.Contacts.ContactAnnotationList, and the ones already present in Telegram.Td.Api.Users.

Given that the term import seems to mean "grab Windows contacts and shove them into importingContacts before invoking Telegram.Td.Api.ChangeImportedContacts", it looks like the correct place to do this would be ImportAsync.

Am I guessing this correctly? I'm unlikely to actually fully set up a dev environment, but if I do, would this approach be accepted as a PR?

[FrayxRulez]

My only doubt would be how to implement it having a clear and straightforward UX

[dancojocaru2000]

Since this seems like a quite advanced feature, it shouldn't necessarily have much of an UX. This would be well suited in a kind of hidden menu in a "Telegram Debug" style area (on the iOS app, if you tap the settings icon 10 times, it opens a menu with all kinds of debug options).

[MarcAnt01]

In my opinion that's just the contrary of a clear and straightforward UW

[ivucica]

I am not on my pc right now, but as I recall “sync” is an option that implies, well, sync. If the app otherwise has access to contacts, but sync toggle is off, why would it upload contacts to Telegram? With contact access while sync is off, it can expose existing contacts to Windows, and integrate with My People, without pushing anything to cloud. This was in fact my expectation of the behavior.

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