Photo: TrueCaller
For years I used an iPhone, until one bright day I decided to convert my religion – and since then I’m still on the dark/light side, everyone and their world view. One of the reasons for this, besides the call recording feature, is Truecaller. This popular call filtering application saved me hundreds of calls from insurance companies, questionable associations, politicians, spam and sales agents of communication companies that rhyme with “Hot”.
The thing is, while Android users have enjoyed all this goodness, iOS users have always been let down by the app. But now Truecaller is announcing a new update to the iPhone app that will bring its flagship feature of real-time call recognition for the first time, but it just won’t be.
Significant update after significant update
In 2022, the iOS version of Truecaller received a fairly significant update, when the company rebuilt the app to be able to use Apple’s CallKit, allowing it to hold a 10x larger pool of identified numbers compared to the previous version. Despite the significant update at the time (which led to an 80% increase in the number of users, according to the company), the application was still not equal in its capabilities to its Android version. Truecaller Android users are very familiar with Live Caller ID. This is the feature that gives you a rectangular popup with the identity of the person calling you, as soon as he is not part of your contacts, and until now, this feature did not exist at all on the iPhone. Now that is changing.
Let’s start with the good news: Truecaller has announced that Live Caller ID is finally coming to the iPhone, so that it can show you the identity of the caller in a call as soon as it arrives and in real time. At the same time, Truecaller doubled the size of the buffer it can store on your smartphone, and improved its algorithm for more accurate spam detection (so you won’t necessarily need Live Caller ID). So much for the good news, let’s move on to the bad: the Live Caller ID feature is only available to users of Truecaller’s premium plans (Is Truecaller Premium worth the money? We checked), unlike Android users who simply get this feature for free. But even if you’ve already unlocked the wallet, you won’t get the same seamless experience of Android devices. On iOS, the app relies on Siri Shortcuts, so whenever you get a call from an unknown source that you want to identify, you’ll have to summon Siri (by saying “Hey Siri, Search Truecaller”), and after the app searches for the number and finds a match, it will display You have the caller ID on the screen. Luckily for you, you can bypass the embarrassment, and associate this shortcut with a pat on the back of your iPhone (what was known at the time as the “secret iPhone button”).
The company explains that this annoying and unnecessary bypass comes, of course, following the various limitations that Apple imposes on call recognition applications. The CEO of the company explained that Apple limits the amount of numbers that services like TrueCaller can keep in a database on the device, which means that numbers that are not in this database can only be identified by manual search. Very annoying, but it’s the best there is right now.
Gigtime’s new app
