Hi All,
First–I want to state this clearly: Roon Labs does not fetch, store, use, or access your contacts list in any way.
The reason why the app requests the READ_CONTACTS permission is because Roon uses the name of the logged-in user profile, in order to personalize the name of the device and its zone in a few places. For example, my phone shows up as “Brian’s Pixel XL 2” because we extracted “Brian” from my profile. There are two Pixel XL 2’s in my household, so being able to tell them apart is pretty important!
Unfortunately, Google has bundled access to this piece of data into a needlessly broad permission category that includes the full contact list.
We have looked into this in the past–back in 2015 we tried to remove this permission (because it appeared unnecessary to us at the time) and discovered that it broke the above mentioned functionality, so it was put back, and remains in place.