Truecaller: The True Sides of the Divide

There is a possibility that every phone user has one time or the other seen a call with the identity ‘unknown caller’? Often times, this leaves us with an almost futile effort of identifying the caller.

However, technology has evolved. We are getting newer solutions in terms of security and privacy as regards spam calls.

Wikipedia defines spam calls as ‘unwanted calls in form of fake numbers, hidden identity of the caller. A spam call can either be done to prank or dupe the user (sometimes from people you know)’

TrueCaller, a Swedish company came up with an idea of a global directory to handle caller issues. The application was developed by True Software Scandinavia AB, a privately held company in Stockholm, Sweden. It was founded by Alan Mamidi and Nami Zanringhalam in 2009.

The global directory uses crowd-sourced data which enables it to work even in countries like India and America where public data is not available. This is quite an interesting global influence.

In a recent study conducted by Truecaller, countries like Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and Egypt are among the top 20 countries getting the most spam calls.

Furthermore, a stats gathered by pulse.ng reveals that there are 50 million African users of the True Caller app. This is about a third of Facebook’s Africa population. More to this, Nigeria alone has 6.2million users, with about 3million active monthly users.

During a recent visit to Nigeria, Truecaller’s Director of Communications, Kim Fai Kok revealed that Nigeria is applications third largest market globally, adding that the mobile app is helping Nigerian users block more than 13 million calls, and 25 million spam SMS on a monthly basis.

However, with this intriguing statistics, and as popular as the application sounds, there are people who still don’t use it for one reason or the other.

I got some answers from interviewing a few people on why they use or not use true caller :

For Michael Natty ,”I see no reason why I should use it. In fact, it has never crossed my mind; It is nothing special to me”.

”I have been using true caller for the past two years now. It is a really wonderful app to have. It saves me the stress of asking who a caller is. I do not have to fear strange or hidden numbers.”, Adegoke Taiwo added.

”I can’t remember how long I have been using it; maybe 4yrs. It helps in revealing unknown calls and callers. Its usage is so amazing that I cannot even attach any disadvantage to it” – Segun Dairo

”For the past three years, using true caller has been great. Call identification, spam callers, spam messages are being dealt with. I can even block anything called spam” Omotosho Temitope affirmed.

Therefore, it is obvious that as useful and popular as trueCaller is, there are people who don’t make use of it. This points to the fact that individual differences cannot be avoided.

Do you use TrueCaller app? Let us hear your story.