Truecaller has crossed 500 million downloads and surpassed 150 million daily active users (DAUs) globally with over 1 million subscribers paying for its Premium services.
The growth has been due to features like the smart dialer, VoIP capability, Instant Messaging, and its spam-free SMS inbox. Kenya is Truecaller’s fourth biggest market in Africa with over 1.4 million daily active users.
Treucaller has payments services in India and is set to expand them to more markets in 2020 which might likely deepen its numbers from the present 150 million DAU’s achievement.
According to Zakaria Hersi the Director of Partnerships for Africa, “Africa accounts for 15.5% of the total daily active users, which makes this our second biggest region outside Asia, most primarily India.”
Truecaller has also announced that it be rolling out Call Alerts to help users depend less on low-speed and faulty networks, to know who’s calling before the phone rings and Full Screen Caller ID for users to see instantly whether an incoming call is personal, business, or spam – and on top of this you can do all other key actions like accepting, rejecting or sending a quick message from the same screen.
“By differentiating ourselves from the standard stock dialer and messaging apps, and solving some fundamental communication problems for our users, we have been able to capitalize and excel the competition,” said Alan Mamedi, CEO & Co-founder, Truecaller. “This is a very significant achievement. 150 million daily active users and 500 million downloads is extraordinary. These milestones underline the faith and trust our users have in our brand.”
The 1 million paying subscribers globally on its paid subscription service, Truecaller Premium include automatically updating and blocking top spammers in a user’s region to Android users across all global markets of Truecaller.
In the 1 million paying subscribers 20 percent of them are based in Africa. The application service identifies more than half a billion calls a month in this region, out of which 50 percent of SMS received are spam. In Kenya the application blocks and filters more than 7.5 million calls a 70% increase compared to 2018 and 17 million spam SMSes which is a 21% increase compared to 2018 per month.
Premium users will enjoy an ads-free experience, get notifications when someone view their profiles, they will be able to record important conversations and listen to them later though this service is not yet available for Android 9 and above platforms. These users will be able to send contact requests to people outside your networkand enjoy a professional look when calling someone with a premium badge.
The spam-blocking features are available in Truecaller Premium, which is currently offered worldwide at an 80% discount for the first 3 months globally for all new subscribers. In Kenya the cost of subscription is KES 102.01 per month.
