You can retrieve Contact info without permissions and is something like you tell in the question.
In resume, you create an intent to pick a contact, this give you a URI (and temporally, also give you permissions to read it), then you use the URI to query to retrieve the data using Contact Provider API.
You can read more about it in Intents guide.
For example (from the guide):
static final int REQUEST_SELECT_PHONE_NUMBER = 1;
public void selectContact() {
// Start an activity for the user to pick a phone number from contacts
Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_PICK);
intent.setType(CommonDataKinds.Phone.CONTENT_TYPE);
if (intent.resolveActivity(getPackageManager()) != null) {
startActivityForResult(intent, REQUEST_SELECT_PHONE_NUMBER);
}
}
@Override
protected void onActivityResult(int requestCode, int resultCode, Intent data) {
if (requestCode == REQUEST_SELECT_PHONE_NUMBER && resultCode == RESULT_OK) {
// Get the URI and query the content provider for the phone number
Uri contactUri = data.getData();
String[] projection = new String[]{CommonDataKinds.Phone.NUMBER};
Cursor cursor = getContentResolver().query(contactUri, projection,
null, null, null);
// If the cursor returned is valid, get the phone number
if (cursor != null && cursor.moveToFirst()) {
int numberIndex = cursor.getColumnIndex(CommonDataKinds.Phone.NUMBER);
String number = cursor.getString(numberIndex);
// Do something with the phone number
...
}
}
}
