Truecaller has announced that its dialer app will be pre-installed on all Huawei phones. The Honor 8 will be the first phone to offer the dialer app, following which Truecaller integration will be rolled out to all Huawei handsets sold in America, Middle East and North Africa, Southeast Asia, and India.
Truecaller's dialer is already pre-installed on Cyanogen and BLU handsets, but the deal with Huawei is its most significant yet. Truecaller uses a crowdsourced approach to identify spam callers, with the company processing over half a billion calls every month.
While it isn't popular in Western markets, Truecaller is a must-have service in India, where unsolicited calls are a major nuisance. Spam call detection is a major feature, but Truecaller's raison d'être is its caller ID service. The company crowdsources contact details from its users' address books, and uses that information to provide live caller ID for incoming calls.
Meanwhile, Huawei shipped 61 million smartphones in the first half of 2016, repesenting a 25% increase from the same period last year. With the Chinese vendor making an aggressive push for Western markets, it is looking to services like Truecaller to differentiate its handsets. From George Zhao, president of Huawei's Honor division:
As we were planning the launch of our flagship device Honor 8, we were looking for partners who can truly redefine the user experience, Truecaller was an obvious choice to help improve the native calling functions. They provide an indispensable service for millions of users each day. We are joining hands to ensure that respective brands get the best of both worlds.
Truecaller is closing in on 200 million global users, and the move with Huawei has the potential to effectively double its userbase over the coming years. While the app provides a valuable service, the inherent nature of its business means that even if you don't have Truecaller installed, your number may be stored in its database provided one of your contacts has the app installed. That said, Truecaller has made it easy to unlist your number from the service.
What do you guys make of the move?
