Programmatically change linked contacts array in ABAddressBook, ABPersonCopyArrayOfAllLinkedPeople

Question

Can one programmatically add/remove the contacts inside the CFArray returned by ABPersonCopyArrayOfAllLinkedPeople, thus, effectively, linking and un-linking different records of contacts from various sources to show as "unified" in the iOs phone book?

Mothering

If you have the same question about the more recent CNContact API, you can check out this question: #30944565 – Dicker

Answer 1

As far as I've been able to determine, there is no public API exposed for linking or unlinking contacts, at least in the iOS 6 SDK. However, it does appear that you can create links between contacts by calling the undocumented, private function bool ABPersonLinkPerson(ABRecordRef from, ABRecordRef to). That signature may not be exactly right--I haven't tested this too thoroughly.

Your app is of course unlikely to be approved if you make use of private APIs, but if you're trying to, say, make a fake address book for the sake of unit testing and you want some linked contacts in that, this could be useful.

Karolyn