Popular caller ID app Truecaller has long disadvantaged iPhone users by not offering real-time caller information – a feature that Android users have enjoyed for some time. Today, that changes as the company rolls out an update that brings real-time caller ID support to its iOS subscribers.
The company was able to implement this feature because Apple introduced live caller ID lookup in iOS 18, allowing third-party caller ID apps to securely call their server to get information. caller information. Notably, this is the Swedish company’s first major release after co-founders Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam left day-to-day operations in November 2024.
Today, Truecaller has more than 2.6 million paying subscribers, with only about 750,000 of them on iOS. However, 40% of Truecaller’s revenue comes from iOS subscriptions. The company also enjoys a 5x higher conversation rate at its premium tier on iOS compared to Android, as well as 80% higher revenue for an iPhone subscriber.
Given the importance of the iPhone to Truecaller’s bottom line, the company continues to develop its iOS app.
In 2022, Truecaller relaunched the iOS app to focus on better spam detection, thanks to Apple allowing the app to store a greater number of numbers locally.
“This has improved overall call identification. But this was not enough because in countries like India, there is a huge calling activity, and all this would not be available in the offline database,” said Nakul Kabra, Product Director of Truecaller, to TechCrunch in an interview.
India also presents other challenges for the company, including the arrival of a service, Calling Name Presentation (commonly known as CNAP, designed to combat spam. The service, currently deployed by local telecom operators, could ultimately become a competitor to Truecaller.
Truecaller also updated its iOS app in 2023 with a live caller ID experience, but that involved a step requiring interaction with Siri and was also not real-time.
Until the release of iOS 18, Truecaller had to rely on a Locally saved 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 its existing larger database for Android users. Apple’s Phone app sends encrypted queries to this database and gets encrypted responses that are only decrypted on the client (iPhone) to display caller ID in real time. This process is called “homomorphic encryption”, because the calculations use encrypted data instead of decrypting it first, while the decryption occurs on the client to display the caller’s information if it matches the data stored on the server.
Kabra told TechCrunch that Truecaller created a way to sync two databases to keep data in sync between them.
“At the moment there may be a bit of a delay as these requests are queued and the encryption we do takes a long time and is very expensive… But it shouldn’t last more than a few hours ” he said. .
TechCrunch tested Live Caller ID as part of Truecaller’s beta program last week and noticed that the feature provides real-time caller information in most cases, although it sometimes misses .
Truecaller’s premium tier on iOS starts at $9.99 per month per person, or $74.99/year. The company also offers its Family plan on iOS starting at $14.99/month or $99.99/year and the premium Gold subscription at $249 per year.
Users can enable the live caller ID search feature via iPhone Settings > Apps > Phone > Call Blocking & Identification.
On iOS 18, Truecaller also updated its interface with the caller’s name appearing in bold above their number. Truecaller is now working on supporting images to display in caller ID for its iOS users.
