How do contact posters really work?

[brightdawn]

So, with contact posters, you can define an appearance what will be seen on the side of the one who is called.
How is this transmitted? I can understand this for Facetime audio calls, etc. But how does it work with a normal mobile cell phone call? The only way, I could imagine, would be a central service where all contact posters are stored, and the called iPhone looks up the mobile number on this central service and downloads the poster. Is this the way it works?

 

[agentm925]

To add onto this, could you also use Live Photos?

 

[bertimus2002]

I've got 2 devices on iOS 17...so far, contact posters don't come in on the call screen as demoed. Seems like a work in progress yet, but we haven't gotten it to work quite yet.

 

[sniffies]

There’s no central service. It’s just like sending a photo to a stranger’s iPhone, only in this case, you send your contact poster to stranger’s Home Screen or Lock Screen.

 

[crackout666]

Is there an option to disallow this?
I don’t want contacts to decide how something looks on my phone.

 

[TimFL1]

There’s no central service. It’s just like sending a photo to a stranger’s iPhone, only in this case, you send your contact poster to stranger’s Home Screen or Lock Screen.

Is it really like that or is it more in line with how the current iMessage profile stuff works that allows you to share a picture and name in an iMessage chat?

The latter would be the most humane way: specify a poster and flag it as „Automatically for all Contacts“, so your device pushes out the updated poster to all your contacts once, whose devices in return take the info and add it to your contact (if it exists in their contacts list)

 

[DaveTheRave]

Yeah im
Not understanding how this differs from how it works in iOS 16.

 

[Brad7]

I don’t like how it’s linked to your AppleID photo. I changed my contact photo and my AppleID also changed with it.

 

[brightdawn]

There’s no central service. It’s just like sending a photo to a stranger’s iPhone, only in this case, you send your contact poster to stranger’s Home Screen or Lock Screen.

yeah .. but how does it send this? There is no transmission channel when doing a plain mobile cell phone call. Maybe a an invisible iMessage in the background?

 

[whsbuss]

My question is will this only work between ios17 iPhones or across all iOS devices?

 

[mattopotamus]

My question is will this only work between ios17 iPhones or across all iOS devices?

probably ios17 devices. Even custom stickers do not show for people who do not have ios17.