That seems like the only logical way, at least for the dialer app. In Gmail for example, I don't need to sort contacts, because my use case is sending an email to a specific person --- I type their name and they pop up (I think Apple mail does this too).
Please don't interpret this as snark or sarcasm, I'm just looking for a use case -- when is this useful? which situations does this improve upon?
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EDIT: i totally missed the "social feed" aspect.
Seems like the best aspect of this is showing social updates from people in your actually contact list -- like a high priority follower list.
I probably follow thousands of people across social media but i really only care about a few dozen people.
A combined feed of their updates is actually valuable to me.