All about Truecaller app

I then explained to him that the ‘Truecaller App’ had thrown up his name and that I always prefer to address people by their name. He was gobsmacked and thoroughly impressed.

I distinctly remember having a similar response the first time a friend introduced me to the app. It’s no wonder that the Truecaller app is insanely popular throughout the world. The two founders of the App, Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam who are Swedish software developers, were recently here in India and this week’s column is inspired by them. 

Truecaller is best described as a Global Telephone Directory. To me, it’s one of the finest examples of crowdsourcing. It’s give-take principle at its best. In order for you to know the names of people calling you, you need to give Truecaller access to your contacts list. To me, that sounds like a fair deal. All the phone numbers are saved on Truecaller’s server. Any time, you get a call, the app accesses the central server, searches for the number and the associated names and then throws up the name. There are many interesting features that this highly useful utility app has. Let’s take a look at a few.

While Truecaller necessarily needs Internet connectivity for it to work, it has the ability to store the number and name of people locally. This way, even when there is no net connectivity, it is able to identify. 

Truecaller makes a database of top spammers around the world. So, when you download the latest version of the Truecaller app, you are also taking advantage of the updated spammers’ list. This means that when a spammer calls, they will not be able to get through to you because they would have already blocked them off.

In the settings, you can also ask Truecaller to block hidden numbers. Most people who use hidden numbers are spammers and this is a good way to get rid of them as well. Its interesting to read about the history of how the Truecaller ideas was born. Alan and Nami, the founders of the app, wanted a better solution to look up phone numbers for the missed calls they received from their relatives who lived abroad.

In the beginning, it wasn’t even an app. It was first published as an online forum. They were surprised that over 10,000 people started to use it within the first week itself. Buoyed by the success, they went about building the app, first for the Blackberry platform (who would have thought, right?) Then, they built a version for the Symbian platform which Nokia used to have and much later for Android and iOS. Today, it’s one of the highest used utility apps in the world.