The popular caller ID app TrueCaller has long put iPhone users at a disadvantage by not providing Caller information in real time. This is a feature that Android users have been enjoying for a while. Today, that’s changing as companies deploy updates that bring real-time caller ID support to iOS subscribers.
Apple introduced Live Caller ID Lookup on iOS 18, allowing third-party caller ID apps to safely call servers to retrieve information about callers, allowing them to implement the feature. In particular, this is also the first major release from the Swedish company after co-founders Alan Maddy and Nami Zalingalam resigned from their daily business in November 2024.
Today, TrueCaller has over 2.6 million paid subscribers, of which only about 750,000 are on iOS. However, 40% of TrueCaller’s premium revenue comes from iOS subscriptions. The company also earns five times the conversation rate in Premium Tier on iOS compared to Android, earning 80% revenue from iPhone subscribers.
Given the importance of the iPhone to TrueCaller’s revenue, the company continues to develop iOS apps.
In 2022, TrueCaller rebooted the iOS app to focus on better spam detection, allowing Apple to store larger numbers locally.
“It improved the overall call identification. But that wasn’t enough, because in countries like India there is a large calling activity and not all of this is available in offline databases.”
India is also presenting other challenges to the company, such as the arrival of services calling presentations of names (commonly known as CNAPs), designed to curb spam. Services currently deployed by local carriers could ultimately emerge as TrueCaller competitors.
TrueCaller updated its iOS app in 2023 with the Live Caller ID Experience, but it included steps that required interaction with SIRI and was not in real time.
Until iOS 18 release, Truecaller had to rely on a Locally stored dictionary for limited phone numbers on iOS.
To enable the new features, TrueCaller has built a new server architecture and created another encrypted database for iOS along with the existing large database for Android users. Apple’s phone app creates encrypted requests in this database, retrieves encrypted responses that are decrypted only on the client (iPhone) and displays the caller ID in real time. This process is called “homogeneous encryption” because the calculations use encrypted data rather than decrypting them first, but displays caller information if decryption occurs on the client and matches the data stored on the server.
Kabra told TechCrunch that TrueCaller has built a way for them to synchronize the two databases and keep data synchronized.
“At this point, there may be a bit of a delay as these requests are lined up. And the encryption we do is very time-consuming and very expensive. But it should take more than a few hours,” he said.
TechCrunch tested live caller IDs under the TrueCaller beta program last week, and we noticed that this feature provides caller information in most cases in real time, but we missed it.
The premium tier for TrueCaller on iOS starts at $9.99 per person per month or $74.99 per year. The company also offers family planning on iOS starting at $14.99 a month or $99.99 a year, as well as top-end gold subscriptions for $249 a year.
Users can use iPhone Settings >[アプリ]>[電話]>[ブロッキングと識別]You can enable the Live Call ID lookup feature via
In iOS 18, TrueCaller has also updated the interface where the caller’s name is displayed in numbers in Bold. Currently, TrueCaller is working to support images that appear in caller IDs of iOS users.
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