TrueCaller, The best ally against telephone spam

There is no week that you do not receive the suspicious call from an unknown phone. I pick up the flies and at the other end I discover the voice of a salesman who is sure that he will change my life with his offer. That if I’m going to save money by expanding my telephone contract, that if he offers to subscribe to his newspaper.

Although, very occasionally, some of these calls are relevant and useful, the vast majority are a waste of time that forces you to master the subtle nuance between being sharp but polite or just being rough and hanging. TrueCaller is the application that saves you from having to think about this type of subtleties because, directly, you will stop receiving those calls or you will be able to identify them in time.

How Truecaller works

Once installed, the application will ask for many permissions. TrueCaller requires access to your contact list, permission to make and manage phone calls and permission to send and view SMS messages. All to be able to use it without limitations.

The second step of the process is to provide you with your telephone number. You will make a call that you do not need to answer (unless you want to talk to a robot). TrueCaller will confirm your number through that call or by a code that will send you by SMS.

True Caller will propose you to be your default application to make calls or send messages, but it is not essential to do so. With its operation in the background you have more than enough for the application to name those unknown phones or block the ones you decide.

In iOS, in addition, you must give TrueCaller permission to manage blocking and identification of calls in Phone -> Block and Caller ID and messages in Messages -> Unknown and unwanted .

From here, when you receive a call from a phone that you do not know, TrueCaller will check your calendar to show you the name behind that number. Then you can add it to your list of blocked phones so that, next time, it does not even interrupt you. It works in the same way for messages.

Other interesting features of TrueCaller

TrueCaller was born in 2009 as a simple caller ID that blocked spam, but it has ended up becoming a full service that replaces your application calls and messages, if you give the appropriate permissions, and includes a payment service.

Read also: Google contacts officially arrives on any device with Android 5.0 or higher

Over time TrueCaller has introduced new interesting features:

• Phone number scanner: Search and scan, with the camera, a phone number that you see printed anywhere. It is very fast and precise in your search and finds you who is behind each number.
• Flash messages: Your message service allows you to send your location, share emojis and your status with your friends
• Friend availability: If your friends also have TrueCaller installed you can see exactly when they are available and when they are not, either because they are making another call or they are without coverage.
• Backup: It is possible to make a backup in your Google Drive of your call history, contacts and settings, to take your way to use TrueCaller to other devices you use.
• Professional version: With your professional mode, after paying $1.99 per month or $17.99 per year, you stop receiving ads, your profile gets the Pro badge that distinguishes you from other users and offers you 30 contact requests at month (to get the personal number of other TrueCaller users using their integrated search.

The more users, the more reliability

TrueCaller’s claim to accumulate more than 250 million users with the downloaded application and recently celebrated the milestone of reaching 100 million daily active users.

Having a good user base is important for any successful application, but in TrueCaller it is directly indispensable : at the moment of installing this app it reads, with your permission, all the contacts in the mobile phone book and integrates them into its database. Currently, this database has data with 3000 million phone numbers identified by you.

When several people associate a name with a specific number, TrueCaller leaves it annotated for the other users. The same happens when several people decide to tag as spam or block a phone number from the application: before picking up, the next user will know who is calling even if they do not have the number in their phone book.

A simple and well-solved idea

The expansion of mobile phone use in today’s society has also brought with it the logical growth of telemarketing techniques. A highly invasive system that is generally abhorred.

The idea of ​​founding TrueCaller came from a simple need : to identify who is hiding behind an unidentified call or message and to avoid telephone spam. Back to give the initiative to the mobile user to decide freely who allow communication. TrueCaller is a very good application that precisely gives us back that right of free choice.

In any case, and as we know all too well, all power carries a responsibility. TrueCaller amasses many permissions and accumulates a lot of contact information (phone numbers associated with people). You have the responsibility to manage that data with the utmost sensibility and sensitivity.