AddressBookUI

Address Book UI is an iOS framework for displaying, selecting, editing, and creating contacts in a user’s Address Book. Similar to the Message UI framework, Address Book UI contains a number of controllers that can be presented modally, to provide common system functionality in a uniform interface.

→ nshipster.com/addressbookui/

The Address Book UI framework in iOS, used alongside AddressBook.framework, provides controllers for managing contacts but includes a uniquely valuable function, ABCreateStringWithAddressDictionary(), which formats address components into a localised string.

It takes a dictionary with keys like kABPersonAddressStreetKey and kABPersonAddressCountryCodeKey to create region-specific address strings, with an optional boolean to append the country name.

This functionality, critical for proper address localisation (e.g., differing formats in the US and Japan), is surprisingly absent from other frameworks like NSLocale or Map Kit and is not available on macOS.

Developers can use NSLocale to infer a country code if needed, ensuring accurate address presentation in Swift applications.