So since I got a phone I have always used it as my address book (yeah, I export and back it up). In the early days Android was pretty nice. You can enter all sorts of things in there; multiple addresses, numbers, company information, birthdays of friends or other important dates etc..
But latterly, Android just won't do birthday dates. Oh sure, the dates are still in there and get exported from the database but there is no way to enter the information or look at it on the phone (I use BirthdayAdapter from F-Droid which causes a reminder on the day)
I expect that some people just put the birthday of their friend in a phone number field. In fact I'm pretty sure that millions of people just use random fields for their own purposes full stop, they just don't care about any of that.
So the article is saying that it is their phone, don't try to control them. If information is in the field and you can't parse it? You store it and export it as received but otherwise ignore it..
But latterly, Android just won't do birthday dates. Oh sure, the dates are still in there and get exported from the database but there is no way to enter the information or look at it on the phone (I use BirthdayAdapter from F-Droid which causes a reminder on the day)
I expect that some people just put the birthday of their friend in a phone number field. In fact I'm pretty sure that millions of people just use random fields for their own purposes full stop, they just don't care about any of that.
So the article is saying that it is their phone, don't try to control them. If information is in the field and you can't parse it? You store it and export it as received but otherwise ignore it..