libfolks now has a backend for accessing address book data from Bluetooth-enabled phones, making use of BlueZ 5. This has been a long time in development, with various developers from Collabora contributing to it (thanks to Matthieu Bouron, Gustavo Padovan, Arun Raghavan and Jeremy Whiting!).

It works using the Bluetooth Phone Book Access Profile (PBAP), which allows a computer to download a phone’s address book as an array of vCards. libfolks will automatically do this for any phone which is paired with the computer (and which isn’t blocked), establishing a connection with any (paired, non-blocked) phone in range.

We’ve only been able to test this with a limited number of phones, so further real-world testing and feedback would be greatly appreciated. To do so, grab the latest version of libfolks from git (https://git.gnome.org/browse/folks/log/), build it and run folks-inspect (making sure that the ‘bluez’ backend is not disabled in ~/.local/share/folks/backends.ini, if you’ve created and customised that file).

As is the design of libfolks, this is not intended as a solution for synchronising contacts between your phone and your computer, but it does provide a handy way of accessing contacts on your phone from GNOME Shell or Contacts, or from other consumers of libfolks data.

Note that the backend only supports BlueZ 5 and explicitly doesn’t support BlueZ 4.