Truecaller gets a makeover with new features

Truecaller, a famous Caller-ID app has rolled out a major update in India. The company, which has more than 70% of users in the country has released certain India only features like Smart SMS and Important Tabs, apart from a new Home Tab, Full Screen Caller-ID and more.

Truecaller says India has more than 60 percent of Gold subscription users and hence the new updates are prioritized for the country first. The new Truecaller app seems to be

complete revamp from the previous versions. This aims to give a streamlined experience for users by bringing all Call History, SMS under a single Home Tab. The revised options below the screen include a Home, Contacts, Premium and Banking.

The All New Home Tab

The Home tab serves as a single place now for managing all your messages, call history and more. This interface aims to reduce the clunky UI found in earlier versions on both Android and iOS. 

We have an all-new Dialer above the Banking section and a revamped Search bar at the top. The search bar is followed by four options: Personal, Favourites, Business and Spam where you can arrange your contacts accordingly. The new UI also aims to improve instant messaging. Users can tap on the profile now to open instant messaging and can have long conversations.

India-Specific Feature

Additionally, the India specific feature gets an update where the users can receive notifications categorised as important in the Important tab. Apart from this, payment bills will be sent to the users to keep track of their history of payments and budgets. The company has also said that it will be adding reminders like Flight delays, Bus seat allocation, Live tracking, postal deliveries to the Important tab in future updates.

Full Screen Caller ID

The most important Caller ID features get a new revamp here. Users will now get a Full-Screen notification during a call in Blue colour for unknown numbers, Purple for Priority calls, Red for potential Spammers, and Gold for users who upgraded to premium.

The new feature aims to eliminate the old pop up feature that hindered users’ experience by blocking other functions. The Company also said that there won’t be any ADs on the Caller ID. Apart from this, the call recording feature is still not present and Truecaller is working with Google on this. The Liver Caller ID option is available to Android users as of now but is waiting for Apple’s green light with new API support to enable it for iOS users.

Privacy and Spam Filtering

Privacy is a term that is often quoted with concern when it comes to Truecaller. However, the company had earlier refused all the claims of neither collecting users’ data nor their availability in the dark web. The Company’s VP Rishit was quoted saying that the app stores all the data locally and only details regarding UPI payments are taken to their back end for analysis.

The app with over 20 crore active monthly users, aims to filter spam calls more aggressively. By collecting reports from users it has already blocked 1000 crore scam calls. Spammers generally use multiple numbers and Truecaller reads offline, online message reports and the categoriser is intelligent enough to filter spam calls, claims the company. Additionally, users can now tell the app if a message has been flagged wrongly as spam. However, manual reporting of messages does not work as of now.

With the new features, Truecaller aims to make the overall user experience better while not compromising on security. The recent update is rolling out and users can update the App in their respective App stores.