Popular caller ID app Truecaller has long left iPhone users at a disadvantage by not offering the caller information in real-time — 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 after the co-founders Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam stepped down from the day-to-day operations in November 2024.
Today, Truecaller has more than 2.6 million paying subscribers, of which only around 750,000 of them are on iOS. However, 40% of Truecaller’s revenue is from iOS subscriptions. The company also gets a 5X conversation rate to its premium tier on iOS compared to Android as well as 80% higher revenue from an 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 did improve the overall call identification. But that wasn’t enough because in countries like India, there is a huge calling activity, and not all this would be available in the offline database,” Truecaller Product Director Nakul Kabra told TechCrunch in an interview.
India presents other challenges for the company, as well, including the arrival of a service, Calling Name Presentation (commonly called CNAP, designed to curb spam. The service, currently being rolled out by local telcos, could eventually emerge as 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 also wasn’t real-time.
Until iOS 18’s release, 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 makes encrypted requests to this database and gets encrypted responses that are only decrypted on the client (iPhone) to show the caller ID in real time. This process is called “homomorphic encryption,” as the computations use encrypted data instead of decrypting them first, while decryption happens on the client to display caller information if it matches with the data stored on the server.
Kabra told TechCrunch that Truecaller had built a way to sync two databases to keep the data synced between them.
“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,” he said.
TechCrunch tested live caller ID under Truecaller’s beta program last week and noticed that the feature does provide caller information in real-time in most cases, though it sometimes misses.
Truecaller’s premium tier on iOS starts at $9.99 a month, per individual, or $74.99/year. The company also offers its family plan on iOS starting at $14.99/month or $99.99/year and the top-end Gold subscription at $249 a year.
Users can enable the Live Caller ID Lookup feature through iPhone Settings > Apps > Phone > Call Blocking & Identification.
On iOS 18, Truecaller also updated its interface with the caller’s name appearing in bold over their number. Now, Truecaller is working on support for images to show up in the caller ID for its iOS users.
