Popular caller ID app Truecaller has lengthy left iPhone customers at a drawback by not providing the caller info in real-time — a function its Android customers have loved for a while. Today, that modifications as the corporate is rolling out an replace that brings real-time caller ID help to its iOS subscribers.
The firm was in a position to implement the function as a result of Apple launched Live Caller ID Lookup in iOS 18, permitting third-party caller ID apps to securely make a name to their server to get details about the caller. Notably, that is additionally the primary main launch from the Swedish firm after the co-founders Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam stepped down from the day-to-day operations in November 2024.
Today, Truecaller has greater than 2.6 million paying subscribers, of which solely round 750,000 of them are on iOS. However, 40% of Truecaller’s income is from iOS subscriptions. The firm additionally will get a 5X dialog price to its premium tier on iOS in comparison with Android in addition to 80% larger income from an iPhone subscriber.
Considering the significance of the iPhone to Truecaller’s backside line, the corporate continues to develop its iOS app.
In 2022, Truecaller relaunched the iOS app to give attention to higher spam detection, because of Apple permitting the app to retailer a bigger set of numbers domestically.
“It did enhance the general name identification. But that wasn’t sufficient as a result of in international locations like India, there’s a enormous calling exercise, and never all this might be obtainable within the offline database,” Truecaller Product Director Nakul Kabra informed TechCrunch in an interview.
India presents different challenges for the corporate, as properly, together with the arrival of a service, Calling Name Presentation (generally referred to as CNAP, designed to curb spam. The service, presently being rolled out by native telcos, might ultimately emerge as a competitor to Truecaller.
Truecaller additionally up to date its iOS app in 2023 with a dwell caller ID expertise, however that concerned a step requiring interplay with Siri and in addition wasn’t real-time.
Until iOS 18’s launch, Truecaller needed to depend on a domestically saved dictionary of restricted cellphone numbers on iOS.
To allow the brand new function, Truecaller constructed a brand new server structure and created a separate, encrypted database for iOS, alongside its present bigger database for Android customers. Apple’s Phone app makes encrypted requests to this database and will get encrypted responses which might be solely decrypted on the consumer (iPhone) to point out the caller ID in actual time. This course of is known as “homomorphic encryption,” because the computations use encrypted information as a substitute of decrypting them first, whereas decryption occurs on the consumer to show caller info if it matches with the information saved on the server.
Kabra informed TechCrunch that Truecaller had constructed a technique to sync two databases to maintain the information synced between them.
“At the second, there is likely to be a little bit of a delay as a result of these requests get queued up, and the encryption that we do may be very time-consuming — and really costly… But it shouldn’t be various hours,” he stated.
TechCrunch examined dwell caller ID underneath Truecaller’s beta program final week and seen that the function does present caller info in real-time typically, although it generally misses.
Truecaller’s premium tier on iOS begins at $9.99 a month, per particular person, or $74.99/12 months. The firm additionally affords its household plan on iOS beginning at $14.99/month or $99.99/12 months and the top-end Gold subscription at $249 a 12 months.
Users can allow the Live Caller ID Lookup function by way of iPhone Settings > Apps > Phone > Call Blocking & Identification.
On iOS 18, Truecaller additionally up to date its interface with the caller’s title showing in daring over their quantity. Now, Truecaller is engaged on help for pictures to point out up within the caller ID for its iOS customers.
