After owning a portable mobile device for so long, we all know the pain of those unsolicited phone calls from telemarketers and loan agencies. We’ve so direly tried to block those calls by downloading and using external applications from the Google Play Store on Android. No more folks.
Google is finally taking cues from Apple, who had recently opened its platform for third-party developers, like Baidu to build a spam call detector into their default calling feature. The tech giant is finally giving users of Nexus and Android One devices the power to block and report spam calls directly from the default(and new version) of the calling feature.
The ‘spam call’ warning feature comes as a part of the phone’s app existing Caller ID feature which was introduced in the previous iteration of the app in 2013. The Caller ID directory already maintains a hefty directory of various business, and can easily identify callers with a bad history — not criminals, but spammers.
If you’re receiving a call from a ‘suspected spam caller‘, then the phone call banner will turn red and show that this particular call is from a possible spam number. After the call, the users will have the opportunity to block the number and report it as a spammer, if he wants to. And if you feel that a spam number is relevant for you, then you will have the option to mark it as a legitimate number for yourself.
There was already one application — Truecaller — whose bread and butter relies heavily upon spam call detection and reporting. The European company provides a Caller ID detection service for incoming calls, which is then matched against a crowd-sourced directory of phone numbers and reported as spam or not. But Google instead is relying upon its users to further build its spam directory, rather than taking a community approach like Truecaller.
This, however, will give users who were previously unaware and unable to protect themselves from spam calls, an option to do so. The new version of the Phone app is now available for download from the Google Play Store.
