Importing birthdays from your contacts

BDays reads the name, the birthday, the preferred phone number and the photo, and nothing else. Access is read only, so nothing is ever written back to your contacts. Every match is listed for you to confirm before anything is saved, and contacts whose birthday has no year import fine.

Most people arrive with birthdays already scattered across their address book, so this is usually the first thing you do. Here is exactly what happens.

What gets read

For each contact you pick, four things:

• The name, as your phone displays it
• The birthday, if the contact has one
• One phone number, so a swipe can call them later
• The photo, if there is one

The phone number is not simply the first one listed. It is the number the contact is marked as preferring, in international form where your phone knows enough to write it that way, so a bulk import stores the same number a careful manual entry would.

Nothing else comes across. No email, no address, no company, no notes from the contact card.

Access is read only, and one direction

The permission BDays asks for is read only. It cannot change a contact, cannot add one, and cannot delete one, and that is enforced by Android rather than by good intentions. Editing a birthday inside BDays afterwards changes it in BDays and leaves your address book untouched.

The import also shows you every match it found and waits. Nothing is saved until you confirm the list, so a wrong-looking date is something you catch before it lands rather than something you clean up later.

Why some contacts with birthdays do not appear

This is the most common complaint, and the cause is not your phone lying to you.

Android has a standard field for a contact’s birthday, and a well-behaved contacts app stores it there. Several manufacturers do not. They save it as a custom dated event with a label of their own instead, which is a different field entirely. An app matching only on the standard birthday field silently skips every one of those contacts, and the person is left staring at an address book full of birth dates and an import screen that found none of them.

BDays accepts both. If a contact has a properly labelled birthday it uses that, and if it does not it will accept a custom dated event as a candidate.

Why anniversaries are ignored on purpose

Contacts can also carry anniversary and other dated events. BDays does not treat either as a birthday, even though accepting them would make the import look more successful.

An anniversary is a real date with a real, different meaning. Importing a wedding anniversary as a birthday would put a wrong date in your list without ever telling you, and you would find out by wishing someone a happy birthday on the wrong day. A custom event can also be wrong, but every candidate is shown to you for confirmation, so that mistake is visible and one tap to fix. A silent one is not.

Contacts whose birthday has no year

Plenty of contacts have a day and a month and no year, because whoever entered it did not know or did not want to say. That is fine. Those import normally and are stored without a year, and BDays will remind you on the day and simply not show an age.

If you would rather not grant contacts access

You do not have to. Birthdays can be added by hand, or brought in from a spreadsheet instead. That route is covered in the CSV format BDays reads.

BDays is free on Google Play, every feature included.