The original note, as written at the time
Come on, we should be able to copy phone contacts and details with just one tap in the address book. This should be especially useful in mobile money transactions.
Ongoing development
We should be able to copy phone contacts and details with a single tap in the address book, and it should be especially useful for mobile money.
The address book is the most carefully maintained dataset on most people’s phones, and it is trapped. Every other application that needs a person’s details asks you to type them again, so the details get retyped, and every retype is an error waiting to send money to the wrong number.
That last part is not a convenience issue. In mobile money, the difference between two digits is the difference between paying a supplier and paying a stranger, and the industry’s answer has been to make you confirm the name, which works only if the name is right, which it is not, because somebody typed it in a hurry.
A single tap that copies name, number and, where relevant, the network and the account, into the transaction, removes the retyping entirely. It is the smallest possible change and it would prevent a class of loss that is currently treated as the customer’s carelessness.
There is a trust problem to solve and it should be stated plainly: an app that can read your address book can read everything. So the transfer has to happen between two devices directly, with the sender choosing one entry, and with nothing uploaded. The receiving app should get the contact and nothing else.
The deeper point is that identity is still being carried by hand. We type our own names into forms forty times a year. A contact is a small structured record with a known owner, and the phone should be able to present it once, deliberately, to a thing that needs it.
One tap, one entry, one purpose. Not a permission granted forever.