ryrona At a low-level, Contacts is split into read and write permissions where write access includes adding new contacts, modifying contacts and deleting contacts. In theory, it might have made sense for there to be user-facing toggles for these things but we don't think it makes sense anymore. The right approach is having fine-grained control via Contact Scopes. Also worth noting that Android apps can request to add a contact or pick a contact without the permission along with other functionality. Contact Scopes works around apps not doing things that way along with it not really being designed for conveniently allowing access to a bunch of contacts instead of just picking one. They should improve all that in Android and add a Contact Scopes style feature. They probably will in the long term especially since iOS 18 (October 2024) added a worse variant of Contact Scopes where you can choose specific contacts for apps not supporting it, but without the ability to grant only a subset of the contact data and apps can detect it's happening so they can nag. Both Signal and WhatsApp will continue to nag users about granting the Contacts permission on iOS when using their feature. Android will probably add something like this and we'll need to figure out what to do.
Android added support for forcefully using the system photo/video picker when apps ask for Photos/Videos access but that doesn't replace most of our Storage Scopes functionality since there are other media categories and also more generic storage access permissions including media and file management which we cover. It's a sign of more things to come though. Some of these features we add will have potentially worse/better standard Android features replace them and we'll need to decide if we want to keep our feature, switch to extending the standard feature, etc. including figuring out how to migrate people's setups over to it if we want to replace it.