Custom contact store for Windows Phone 8

[ This article is for Windows Phone 8 developers. If you’re developing for Windows 10, see the latest documentation. ]

On Windows Phone 8, you can create a custom contact store for your app. When you save contacts to this store, they will appear on the phone’s People hub, integrated with the user’s other contacts. Your contact store can use the standard set of contact properties, such as name and address, but you can also store custom properties for each contact. Custom properties are not displayed on the contact card in the People hub, but can be accessed programmatically from your app. The contact store APIs also provide a mechanism for you to enumerate changes between your custom contact store on the phone and a contact store you maintain in a cloud service in order to synchronize the two stores.

Note

The custom contact store APIs only provide access to the contacts created by your app. If your app needs read-access to the phone’s contact store or calendar, there are different APIs that you should use. For more information, see Read-only access to Contacts and Calendar for Windows Phone 8.

Tip

The Windows Runtime contact store API is supported for both Windows Phone 8 and Windows Phone 8.1 apps. This topic is part of the Windows Phone 8 documentation. To view the Windows Phone 8.1 documentation for this feature, which includes information on developing for both phone and PC, see Managing app calendars.