Truecaller Launches Real-Time Caller ID for iPhone

Image: Truecaller

Truecaller today started rolling out real-time caller ID for iPhone, a feature that has long been absent from its iOS app — reports TechCrunch.

The popular caller ID and spam detection app has offered real-time caller information to Android users for some time now. However, iOS limitations prevented iPhone users from enjoying the same feature. Until now, apps like Truecaller could only provide information on a set of numbers they had to store locally — leaving real-time caller detection out of the question.

This changed with iOS 18, which introduced Live Caller ID Lookup and allowed third-party apps to quickly and securely retrieve caller information from their servers. Apple on Tuesday shipped a Release Candidate build of iOS 18.3, indicating that a public release of the update is imminent.

Truecaller tried adding a live caller ID experience to its iOS app in 2023, but that required interactions with Siri and wasn’t real-time. The company’s newest implementation, however, actually works in real-time by leveraging new server architecture, a dedicated database for iOS combined with Truecaller’s existing database of caller information for Android users, and an encrypted communication line between the iOS Phone app and Truecaller’s servers.

Apple’s Phone app can securely ping Truecaller’s servers for caller information and receive an encrypted response, which is locally decrypted on the iPhone before displaying the caller ID. “At the moment, there might be a bit of a delay because these requests get queued up, and the encryption that we do is very time-consuming — and very expensive… But it should not be more than a few hours,” Truecaller’s Product Director, Nakul Kabra, told TechCrunch in an interview.

iOS users only make up about 750,000 of Truecaller’s 2.6 million paying subscribers, but they account for a whopping 40% of the company’s Premium revenue. What’s more, the company enjoys a 5X higher conversion rate to its premium tier and 80% higher per-subscriber revenue on iOS as compared to Android. All of this despite Truecaller’s iOS users missing out on real-time caller ID until now.

Real-time caller ID for iPhones is available with the latest version of the Truecaller iOS app, which started rolling out today. The feature currently only displays the caller’s name, but the company said it is working on support for caller images next.

If you’ve updated your Truecaller app to the latest version, you can enable Live Caller ID Lookup on your iPhone by going to Settings > Apps > Phone > Call Blocking & Identification. Truecaller Premium on iOS starts at $9.99 USD/month (or $74.99 USD/year) for an individual subscription, and $14.99 USD/month (or $99.99 USD/year) for a family subscription.