On Android, if you don’t like the dialer that Samsung, LG, HTC or even Google gives you on your smartphone, you can easily swap it out for an alternative from the Google Play Store. That’s the beauty of open-source. One of the popular alternatives for dialers on Android happens to be Truecaller, which Cyanogen partnered with in 2015 to bring Truecaller to Cyanogen OS. Truecaller is also available in the Play Store for those that don’t have a Cyanogen OS smartphone, and today it got a fresh new update with loads of new features.
According to the press release from Truecaller, we’re looking at Smart Call History, the ability to completely replace your dialer, as well as an entirely new design and icon. Smart Call History is really the headlining feature here, which will replace unknown numbers with real names and faces when you look at your call history. This works for those numbers that are not saved in your contacts as well. It’s pretty similar to what Google does with their dialer and contacts app. This eliminates the need of saving contacts to your contacts or phonebook. The next feature is a pretty interesting one, it shows you your friends and other contacts availability before you call them. What it does is finds out if they are free and shows you that they are free. This eliminates busy signals, and the possibility of your call not getting answered. Of course, they can always ignore your call, still. Finally, we have the ability to replace the built-in dialer with Truecaller. So you can dial with the built-in dialer on your smartphone and it’ll go through Trucaller. Making things much more simpler.
As far as the new design goes, we have a new material design look here on the Truecaller app. Swiping in from the left gives you the hamburger menu with all sorts of settings. And the right side has your notifications. You also have three tabs, one for calls another for searching for people and finally one that has all of your blocked numbers. We all have that list of numbers that we have blocked from calling us, mostly telemarketers we don’t want to talk too.
Truecaller is available on the Play Store and is free. The update should be live in the Play Store now, if not, give it a few hours and it should be available for you.