Popular caller ID app Truecaller has long put iPhone users at a disadvantage by not offering real-time caller information — a feature its Android users have enjoyed for some time. Today, that changes as the company is rolling out an update that brings real-time caller ID support to its iOS subscribers.
The company was able to implement the feature because Apple introduced Live Caller ID Lookup in iOS 18, allowing third-party caller ID apps to securely make a call to their server to get information about the caller. Notably, this is also the first major release from the Swedish company since co-founders Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam stepped down from day-to-day operations in November 2024.
Today, Truecaller has more than 2.6 million paid subscribers, of which only about 750,000 are on iOS. However, 40% of Truecaller’s revenue is from iOS subscriptions. The company also gets a 5X conversation rate on its premium tier on iOS compared to Android, as well as 80% higher revenue per iPhone subscriber.
Considering 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 larger set of numbers locally.
“It improved overall caller identification. But this was not enough because in countries like India, there is a lot of calling activity and not all of it would be available in the offline database,” Truecaller product director Nakul Kabra told TechCrunch in an interview.
India also presents other challenges for the company, including the arrival of a service, Calling Name Presentation (commonly called CNAP), designed to curb spam. The service, which is currently being used by local telcos, may appear eventually as a competitor to Truecaller.
Truecaller also updated its iOS app in 2023 with a live caller ID experience, but that included a step that required interaction with Siri and also wasn’t real-time.
Until the release of iOS 18, Truecaller had to rely on one locally stored dictionary of limited iOS phone numbers.
To enable the new feature, Truecaller built a new server architecture and created a separate, encrypted database for iOS, alongside the existing larger database for Android users. Apple’s Phone app makes encrypted requests to this database and receives encrypted responses that are only decrypted on the client (iPhone) to show real-time caller ID. This process is called “homomorphic encryption”, as the calculations use encrypted data instead of decrypting it first, while the decryption happens on the client to display the caller’s information if it matches the data stored on the server.
Kabra told TechCrunch that Truecaller had created a way to synchronize two databases to keep data in sync between them.
“Right now, there might be a little bit of a delay because these requests are sitting in the queue, and the encryption that we do is very time-consuming – and very expensive… But it shouldn’t be more than a few hours,” he said. .
TechCrunch tested Live Caller ID under Truecaller’s beta program last week and noted that the feature provides real-time caller information most of the time, though it sometimes lacks.
Truecaller’s premium tier on iOS starts at $9.99 per month, per individual, or $74.99 per year. The company also offers its iOS family plan starting at $14.99 per month or $99.99 per year and the top-tier Gold subscription at $249 per year.
Users can enable the Live Caller ID Lookup feature through iPhone Settings > Apps > Phone > Caller ID & Blocking.
In iOS 18, Truecaller also updated its interface with the caller’s name appearing in bold above their number. Now, Truecaller is working on supporting images to be displayed on the caller ID for its iOS users.
