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Popular caller ID software Truecaller has long put iPhone users at a disadvantage by not providing real-time information to the caller – a feature that its Android users have enjoyed for some time. That changes today, as the company rolled out an update that brings real-time caller ID support to iOS subscribers.
The company was able to implement this feature because Apple introduced it Live Caller ID Lookup iOS 18 allows third-party caller ID apps to securely call their servers to get information about the caller. It should be noted that this is the first major release of the Swedish company co-founders Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam have stepped down from their day-to-day operations In November 2024.
Today, Truecaller has over 2.6 million paying subscribers, of which only 750,000 are on iOS. However, 40% of Truecaller’s revenue comes from iOS subscriptions. The company also achieves 5X premium call rates on iOS compared to Android and 80% higher revenue per iPhone subscriber.
Given the importance of the iPhone to Truecaller, the company continues to develop its iOS app.
Truecaller in 2022 restarted The iOS app focuses on better spam detection, thanks to Apple allowing the app to store a larger set of numbers locally.
“It improved overall caller ID. But it wasn’t enough because countries like India have huge calling activity and not all of it will be available in the offline database,” Truecaller product director Nakul Kabra said in an interview with TechCrunch.
India also presents other challenges for the company, including the arrival of a service, Caller Name Presentation (commonly referred to as CNAPdesigned to prevent spam. The service, currently provided by local telecom companies, may eventually rival Truecaller.
Truecaller also updated its iOS app in 2023 with a live caller ID experience, but that involved a required step. interaction With Siri and also in real time.
Until the release of iOS 18, Truecaller was to be trusted A locally stored dictionary of limited phone numbers on iOS.
To enable the new feature, Truecaller built a new server architecture and created a separate, encrypted database for iOS alongside the larger database available for Android users. Apple’s Phone app sends encrypted requests to this database and receives encrypted responses that are only decrypted on the client (iPhone) to reveal the caller’s identity in real time. This process is called “homomorphic encryption” because the calculations use the encrypted data instead of first decrypting it, and the decryption happens on the client to display the caller’s information if it matches the data stored on the server.
Kabra told TechCrunch that Truecaller has built a way to synchronize the two databases to keep the two databases in sync.
“There might be a bit of a delay right now because these requests are queued and the encryption we do takes a long time – and it’s very expensive … But it shouldn’t be more than a few hours,” he said. .
TechCrunch tested Truecaller’s live caller ID as part of its beta program last week, and noted that while the feature sometimes misses, most of the time it provides information about the caller in real-time.
Truecaller’s premium tier on iOS starts at $9.99 per person per month or $74.99 per year. The company also offers a family plan on iOS starting at $14.99 per month or $99.99 per year, and a top-tier Gold subscription at $249 per year.
Users can enable Live Caller ID Lookup via iPhone Settings > Apps > Phone > Caller Blocking & Identification.
In iOS 18, Truecaller has also updated its interface with the caller’s name appearing in bold above the number. Truecaller is now working on support for images to appear on caller ID for iOS users.
