Cyanogen partners Truecaller, brings caller ID to Cyanogen's phones

Cyanogen has announced a partnership with Truecaller in a deal that will put Truecaller's web-enabled caller ID right into phones running Cyanogen OS.

According to the Verge, the new feature exists as a built-in service and requires users to choose it before it starts working. After allowing it, it will inform the user about the identity of the incoming caller in less than a second.

Dave Herman, Cyanogen's vice president of product, pointed out that the feature does more other than identifying numbers and was designed to keep spam at bay. Besides identifying an incoming caller, it lets users report bad numbers. So far, its database includes about 1.7 billion numbers and, if the caller has been marked as a solicitor or scammer, user will see it in Truecaller's caller ID.

Herman was quoted as saying that customers still see the phone number, but then they see that 635 people have marked it as a spam call and instantly they can answer it or decide whether to reject it. He also said that it's something that's going to bode well for emerging markets, where spam calling is very high. Truecaller is being used by more than 100 million people, Herman says.

Cyanogen is presently in the middle of another similar deal with Microsoft that it announced last month. It will bring native integrations of Bing, Skype, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook and Microsoft Office into Cyanogen OS later this year. The Truecaller integration into Cyanogen OS is part of an upcoming software update in the next few months. Users who already have the app installed will also be able to keep using it.