Same here. And I wouldn't share my contacts regardless. That's a big ask before getting to any main features and not worth the risk to me.

So a couple of thoughts: 1) Allow me to sign in and post texts without permissions or sharing contacts. 2) Give the option to ask me for photo/file access permissions when I push the photo upload button. 3) When adding contacts, a prompt for contact permission is okay then but should be optional i.e. I should be able to put a phone number or email address in manually. I don't know if you had that or not I stopped at the file permission.