Your theory on why they shut down your APP makes some kind of sense, but then why the hell would they randomly target ONE print from my tiny Etsy shop which no one ever buys prints from? xD

Using Record Identifiers

Every record in the Address Book database has a unique record identifier. This identifier always refers to the same record, unless that record is deleted or the MobileMe sync data is reset. Record identifiers can be safely passed between threads. They are not guaranteed to remain the same across devices.

The recommended way to keep a long-term reference to a particular record is to store the first and last name, or a hash of the first and last name, in addition to the identifier. When you look up a record by ID, compare the record’s name to your stored name. If they don’t match, use the stored name to find the record, and store the new ID for the record.

But the searching by first name and last name doesn’t always bring up the correct person. For example, a customer told me today they had a contact with the name “John Smith (lives across from Jane Doe)”. When he selected that person, the name search found a separate “Jane Doe” record instead of this one. I’m not sure what algorithm the ABAddressBookCopyPeopleWithName method uses though.

It looks like iOS has a fixed set of properties and OS X has a customizable set of properties that can be added to an ABPerson. So you would probably need to abscond one of the fixed properties on iOS to store your custom identifier. Not sure if that’s a good solution or not, especially if the user was using the property for something else.