Truecaller brings real-time caller ID to iPhone users

Standard caller ID app Truecaller has lengthy left iPhone customers at an obstacle by not providing the caller data in real-time — a characteristic its Android customers have loved for a while. Right this moment, that adjustments as the corporate is rolling out an replace that brings real-time caller ID help to its iOS subscribers.

The corporate was capable of implement the characteristic 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.

Right this moment, Truecaller has greater than 2.6 million paying subscribers, of which solely round 750,000 of them are on iOS. Nevertheless, 40% of Truecaller’s income is from iOS subscriptions. The corporate additionally will get a 5X dialog charge to its premium tier on iOS in comparison with Android in addition to 80% increased income from an iPhone subscriber.

Contemplating 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 deal with higher spam detection, due to Apple permitting the app to retailer a bigger set of numbers regionally.

“It did enhance the general name identification. However that wasn’t sufficient as a result of in nations like India, there’s a enormous calling exercise, and never all this may be out there 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 (commonly called CNAP, designed to curb spam. The service, at the moment being rolled out by native telcos, may 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 interaction with Siri and in addition wasn’t real-time.

Till iOS 18’s launch, Truecaller needed to depend on a regionally saved dictionary of restricted telephone numbers on iOS.

To allow the brand new characteristic, 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 Telephone app makes encrypted requests to this database and will get encrypted responses which might be solely decrypted on the shopper (iPhone) to point out the caller ID in actual time. This course of is known as “homomorphic encryption,” because the computations use encrypted knowledge as a substitute of decrypting them first, whereas decryption occurs on the shopper to show caller data if it matches with the info saved on the server.

Kabra informed TechCrunch that Truecaller had constructed a option to sync two databases to maintain the info synced between them.

“In the mean time, there is perhaps 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… Nevertheless it shouldn’t be various hours,” he mentioned.

TechCrunch examined dwell caller ID underneath Truecaller’s beta program final week and observed that the characteristic does present caller data in real-time typically, although it typically misses.

Truecaller’s premium tier on iOS begins at $9.99 a month, per particular person, or $74.99/yr. The corporate additionally affords its household plan on iOS beginning at $14.99/month or $99.99/yr and the top-end Gold subscription at $249 a yr.

Customers can allow the Dwell Caller ID Lookup characteristic by iPhone Settings > Apps > Telephone > Name Blocking & Identification.

On iOS 18, Truecaller additionally up to date its interface with the caller’s identify showing in daring over their quantity. Now, Truecaller is engaged on help for photographs to point out up within the caller ID for its iOS customers.