Adding contacts dynamically / overriding ContactsContract.Contacts.query() function

Question

I want to write an app/service that extends the regular contacts list. If a user searches a contact (using the native contacts app or even custom one that uses the native contacts query). The app will search the contacts as it should. In addition it will query a web service for results and return results based on the base query + web service results (without saving additional contacts, or it later deletes any added contacts).

From reading I think that if I could override the system's ContactsContract.Contacts query function, I could achieve such a task. But I don't know how to go about to override it's behavior for all apps, or if there is an easier simpler ways to achieve that (some listener, or binding to query function).

Thanks.

Answer 1

Obviously this is not possible unless you're building your own rom, in that case you probably need to modify the native contacts app's ContentProvider.

What you can do, however, is offer an alternative ContentProvider, that when queried, will get results from the system's Contacts ContentProvider, and add whatever you want to the results before returning them to the querying app.

See here about building a public ContentProvider: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/content-provider-creating.html