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tmo1 / sms-ie

SMS Import / Export is a simple Android app that imports and exports SMS and MMS messages, call logs, and contacts from and to JSON / NDJSON files.
GNU General Public License v3.0
312 stars 38 forks source link

vcf export #177

Open bingoxo opened 3 months ago

bingoxo commented 3 months ago

Hi , do you mind changing export format of contacts from json to vcf (which can easily be imported anywhere) ?

tmo1 commented 3 months ago

I do not intend to do this. A core design goal of SMS I/E is to mirror Android's internal data representation as closely as possible. The flexibility of JSON is a good fit for Android's complex internal representation of contacts, and the code involved is relatively straightforward. Translating Android's internal representation to VCF would be more complicated and might entail dropping some metadata. Moreover, Android has native VCF export, so adding VCF support to SMS I/E is of limited value.

I might at some point consider the creation of a traditional (non-Android) OS tool to convert SMS I/E's JSON to VCF, if there appears to be significant interest in such a thing.

bingoxo commented 3 months ago

i hope you can consider at least giving option of choosing between json and vcf , android has native vcf export but not scheduled like your app

tmo1 commented 3 months ago

I don't plan to add VCF support to the app itself, since doing so would entail a non-trivial amound of code that would need to be written, debugged, and maintained, and I don't consider the benefit to be worth it. As I suggested above, I would consider the creation of a standalone utility to convert the JSON output to VCF, since coding such a tool in a language like Python for a normal operating system would be much easier than incorporating VCF support in the app itself.