Building a Phone Dialler for Families and Friends using Xamarin – Part 1

The idea was to create a Phone Dialler where I can mark my folks (friends and families) as Favorites. You might think that we already have similar functionality available in our current Dialer, so why re-invent the wheel.

However, the way I want to do is that we have a different kind of implementation and that the dialer is something that intrigues me. So let’s see how far I can go into.

Now, in order to achieve this, obviously I will use my favorite IDE i.e., Visual Studio and the technology would be Xamarin.

The Basic Functionality

Let’s try to examine the blocks involved in this kind of App and the basic requirements in order to achieve this. Definitely, we can have other services that can be attached to it at a later point in time but then let’s keep the options to a basic minimum for now.
For the App to work, I would need to access the Phone Contacts as well as Call Logs. The App should have existing Contacts accessed from the Device, Call Logs to access the History, as well as an SQLite DB to maintain the favorites. Let’s not forget the Dialer Pad for dialing numbers directly.

  • Permissions:
    • Access Phone Contacts (Read and Write)
    • Access Call Logs (Read and Write)

To build the UI, we can always make use of ListViews, MasterDetail Pages, etc., to render the desired UI. I will definitely make use of the NuGet packages to get some faster results.

I have already started pushing in my code to GitHub. Once the Code is ready in terms of basic functionality, I will make it public, but for now, let’s hang onto it.

Anubhav Ranjan
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