Discourse is introducing a new feature allowing users to invite contacts from their phone’s contact list, starting with Android Chrome 80 and iOS 14.5 beta. The feature uses feature detection and gracefully degrades to manual email entry if unsupported. It filters contacts with emails and limits selection to one at a time. While available on latest Discourse and Meta, it requires Chrome Dev/Canary or iOS 14.5 beta for testing. The API is not supported on Windows, macOS, Chrome OS, Linux, or Firefox/Safari, and Google Contacts cannot be used as a workaround. Falco confirmed the feature’s availability, while Justin_Vega and anon82467725 inquired about broader compatibility, which Falco clarified is limited to Android and iOS.
We use feature detection and graceful degradation, so the retro way of manually typing emails still works, but if we present the contact picker button on the UI, clicking on it will open your device contacts app and allow you to pick one contact.
We filter only contacts with emails registered, and limit the selection to only one contact at time so the workflow is the same.
If you want to test it right now, it is live on latest Discourse, and naturally here on Meta. But until Chrome 80 releases you need to use their Dev or Canary channel.
Is the API not supported in Windows? I have all of my contacts in the People app. It would be very convenient if Discourse could access contacts from that app for invitation purposes. Could I possibly use Google Contacts as a workaround?
Also, is the API included in all Chromium browsers? I’m wondering if it would work in Microsoft Edge, Opera, etc. On top of that, is the API included in Firefox and Safari?
