Truecaller Global Verified Telephone Directory

Sales Calls, Spam Calls, Pranks, etc; we all want to avoid them. Development in technology has pushed this thing further. Now it is quite easy for anyone to make a call from internet. It is widely used by marketing firms. They make constant call to provide information on services which we might never need. This are Spam Calls. They consumes our time and also irritates whenever you are busy in something. Till date our telecom providers have no effective solution. They are running a DND service where you have to list your phone number in the Do Not Call list. But it is not 100% effective. What if you have a smart app that can give you information of a phone number before picking it up? We are always curious about an unknown number. Many of us think this can be something important and when we pick it then we find it as a spam call. Here we have a trusted application called Truecaller which is somewhat like a CallerID. A global phone directory which has listing of almost all Spam numbers. Once this app is active in your phone it will tell you whether the call you are receiving is a spam call or not. Truecaller works well in various countries. But being a private firm people have choices to remove their numbers from it. Second thing is that different countries follow different rules of privacy. This restricts the output of Truecaller. Still I am able to get satisfactory results from it.

Truecaller comes in two versions. First is free and second is Premium. The free version gives you name and location of phone number. You can also share that on social network websites. The premium edition comes with more benefits. It is ads free, shows you info on who has viewed your profile and 30 contact request.

Features:

• Global Verified Telephone Directory
• Effective Caller ID
• Social Media Integration
• Call Blocking Functionality
• Available on various mobile platform
• Reverse Number Lookup

UI and Usage:

Truecaller is a lightweight app. It is more comfortable to use on Android. But if you are using it on Symbian then your phone might work slowly. I had faced a bit issue on Nokia E71 long back when I was using Truecaller. You need an active internet connection on your device to get information. This app works actively in the background and when you receive a call it gives you a popup message on the screen. If the number is not listed you won’t get any info. You can mark a phone number as spam which is updated in Truecaller database. The app once installed will upload your Phone book on its database. This is further used in the verification process. This does not mean that your phone numbers are leaked. They are being used for more effective verification. Truecaller mostly gets data verified through people. It has more than 10million users around the globe. It has become one of the largest mobile phone communities.

Truecaller can help you to block spam phone calls and sms as well. The new edition has social media integration. It keeps your phonebook updated by adding profile pictures and status. The verification process is quite simple. Just install the app and add your phone number. You will get a verification call. You connect your Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus account on this. At the time of registration you have an option to show up your phone number publicly or not.

The UI is quite simple. I am testing this on Android phone. The menu is available by swiping from the left where you can search for a number, see the history, modify notification, check who has viewed your profile (which only works in premium edition), block and enter in the settings. Under the settings panel tap on Caller ID and you have full access to change Truecaller behavior. You can enable/disable for Call and SMS. There is a bit of customization also available.

Truecaller has integrated social networking features. The following image on the top is the actual home screen of Truecaller. A search box is placed with notification about calls you had received. On the top right there are two more icons. The first one is for checking out the history and the second one is for sharing numbers of information on your favorite social networking site.

Performance:

The app works well on various platforms. But for Symbian it can make the phone slow. That is due to low amount of ram. It works quite nicely on android also. Truecaller is a very helpful companion for your phone. It can tell you which calls to pick and which one to avoid. You can just block them if you are annoyed with some constant calling or sms. It is easy to customize and offers you full control on settings. You can use it as per your need. There is no other phone directory app available which is more effective than Truecaller. It is most widely used in UK and India and also is expanding on other countries. This gives an extensive amount of database to be accessed. Truecaller has kept things limited on the free edition.

Privacy Concerns:

Recently Turecaller has faced an issue when its database was hacked. You can get details on Wikipedia. Many online services that has huge amount of user database are prone to this kind of attacks. If you search for recent news you can find Yahoo, Snapchat, Twitter, etc; are also hacked and huge of information is leaked. It is very important that this type of services should maintain the highest level of quality standards so that we can use them with maximum trust.

Official statement from Truecaller: It was unfortunate but the information remained safe and nothing was compromised. Something important to point out was that it was our website that suffered the attack and not the app. Truecaller does not store passwords, credit card information, or any other sensitive information about our users; it is safe to use Truecaller.

Conclusion:

Truecaller is useful in many ways. If you want to stop those spam calls and messages then it is quite effective to have this app on your phone. Being a cross platform app it is almost available for everyone. The free edition still comes up with all required feature like call and sms blocking. You can go ahead and upgrade to premium edition that will cost you around Rs.55 for a month and Rs.270 for 6 months. Reaching a 45 million global users and 25 million users in India is a huge achievement for Truecaller. New features are added to increase user interaction on it. The app is ideal for everyone.

Pros:

• Verified Mobile Community
• Easy User Interface
• Available for various mobile platforms

Cons:

• Bit slow on Symbian
• Rs.55 a month is bit costly