Is there a simple way to check if an incoming caller is a contact in Android?

Question

When an Android phone receives a call it automatically checks if the call exists in its own contact database. I was wondering if there is a simple way to access that information

Answer 1

The phone app uses the contacts ContentProvider too; I'm not sure why you would want to avoid that. Besides, it's the only publicly-accessible way of accessing that information.

Resolving a number to a name (pre 2.0, in this case) is simple enough anyway:

Uri uri = Uri.withAppendedPath(Phones.CONTENT_FILTER_URL, Uri.encode(number));

String name = null;
Cursor cursor = context.getContentResolver().query(uri, 
                    new String[] { Phones.DISPLAY_NAME }, null, null, null);
if (cursor != null && cursor.moveToFirst()) {
    name = cursor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex(Phones.DISPLAY_NAME));
    cursor.close();
}