Update, October 2026 — The deadline in this article has passed. Call recording ended on Truecaller for iPhone on 30 September 2025 and recordings not exported before then are gone; the steps below no longer apply. What the situation is now, and why recording a call on an iPhone was never really Truecaller's decision, follows the original article.
Truecaller, the app most Bangladeshis use to find out who is ringing from an unknown number, is removing call recording from its iPhone app. The feature stops working after 30 September, and recordings still stored in the app are deleted after that date. Nakul Kabra, who heads Truecaller’s iOS product, told TechCrunch the company would concentrate instead on Live Caller ID and automatic spam blocking — the things Truecaller is actually for.
Why it was always awkward on iPhone
Apple does not allow third-party apps to record phone calls. There is no API for it, and there never has been. When Truecaller launched subscription call recording for iPhone in June 2023 it had to build around the ban: the app would add a separate recording line to your call — effectively a three-way call in which the third participant was a Truecaller server that captured the audio. It worked, but each recording cost the company real telephony money, it was technically fragile, and the user had to trust a remote server with the content of their calls. Truecaller now says the approach was “complex and expensive”, which was true from the start. Android is unaffected: on most Android phones Truecaller records locally.
Save your recordings now
The app is showing iPhone users a pop-up warning; do not dismiss it without acting.
- Open Truecaller and go to the Record tab.
- Tap the Settings icon on the right, open Storage preference and set it to iCloud storage. This copies all recordings to your iCloud, where they survive the shutdown.
- To keep a single recording elsewhere, swipe left on it in the Record tab, then tap Share or Export and save it to Files, WhatsApp or email.
Do this before 30 September. After that the recordings are gone and Truecaller cannot restore them.
What to use instead
Apple itself now offers the thing it denied everyone else: since iOS 18, the Phone app can record a call from a button on the call screen, with a spoken announcement to both parties that recording has begun, and a transcript in Notes. It works on the iPhone 12 and newer running iOS 18, in supported languages — English and Hindi are in; Bangla is not yet, which affects the transcript but not the audio. The announcement is not optional. That is Apple’s answer to the consent question that made it ban third-party recorders in the first place, and in Bangladesh, where recording a call without telling the other party is legally murky, it is the safer design anyway.
Source: Indian Express, via Prothom Alo.
Where this stands now
Truecaller’s iPhone call recording was switched off on schedule on 30 September 2025, a little over two years after it launched for paying subscribers in June 2023. Recordings that were not downloaded, shared out of the app, or moved to iCloud before that date were deleted and cannot be recovered. Android is unaffected and always was, because Android permits an app to record locally and iOS does not.
Why Truecaller never really controlled this
Separate what Truecaller decided from what it was always constrained by, because the second part explains every call-recording app on the iPhone.
Apple has never provided an API for recording a phone call. Not a restricted one, not an entitlement you can apply for — none. An app on iOS cannot reach the audio of a cellular call at all. So every third-party call recorder that has ever worked on an iPhone has done the same thing: it did not record the call, it added a participant to it. Truecaller’s implementation merged your call with a second line answered by a Truecaller server, and that server recorded what it heard.
Three consequences follow from that design, and they were present from the first day rather than arriving later.
- It cost money per minute. Every recorded call was a real telephony leg to a real number, billed by a carrier. A feature whose marginal cost rises with use is a feature that gets withdrawn when usage grows.
- It was fragile. Conference-calling behaviour varies by carrier and network, and a recording that depends on a successful merge fails in exactly the conditions — poor signal, roaming — where people most want it.
- The audio left the phone. The content of the call passed through, and was stored on, a third party’s infrastructure. That was unavoidable given the design, and it is the part users were least likely to have understood.
Truecaller’s own description of the approach as complex and expensive was accurate. It was also true in 2023.
What Apple shipped instead
The feature became redundant because Apple built it in. Since iOS 18.1, the Phone app can record a call from a control on the call screen, store the audio, and produce a transcript in Notes. It runs on iPhone 12 and later.
The design difference is the whole argument. Apple’s recorder plays a spoken announcement to both parties when recording starts, and the announcement cannot be disabled. That is Apple answering the consent question that caused it to forbid third-party recorders in the first place: it will allow recording, but not secret recording.
Transcription is limited to supported languages, which is where this lands unevenly. English and Hindi are supported; Bangla is not, so a call in Bangla records as audio with no usable transcript.
The rule that matters more than the feature
Whether you may record a call is a legal question, not a technical one, and it varies more than most people assume. Some jurisdictions require only one party to consent, which means you may record your own call. Others require every party to agree, and recording without telling the other person is an offence regardless of which app did it. Several countries treat a recording made without consent as inadmissible in court, which quietly defeats the most common reason people record calls in the first place — to have proof.
Apple’s unskippable announcement sidesteps the whole question by making a secret recording impossible, which is why it is the safer design even where the law is unsettled. If you need a record of a conversation and are unsure of your position, the robust options have not changed: ask the other person on the recording itself, or put the substance in writing afterwards and send it to them.
