Huawei phones to come with Truecaller pre-installed, starting with the Honor 8

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?

Harish Jonnalagadda
Senior Editor - Asia

Harish Jonnalagadda is a Senior Editor overseeing Asia at Android Central. He leads the site's coverage of Chinese phone brands, contributing to reviews, features, and buying guides. He also writes about storage servers, audio products, and the semiconductor industry. Contact him on Twitter at @chunkynerd.

28 Comments
  • I think this is cool.
  • Unicorn spotted Posted via Android Central App
  • Lol, you got jokes. As only as it can be removed, I don't have a strong opinion.
  • Oh well in that case whatever then Posted via Android Central App
  • This messed up my Google contacts, changing names at will. No thanks.
  • That's why you have to check setting. Smh.
  • Yea, more 3rd-party crap on a phone!
  • Truedialer is still a lot better though.
  • Can't wait for my Honor 8! I couldn't decide on Black or that spectacular Sapphire Blue so I got both. I'm returning the one I like the least.
  • That's a great plan. I think both are beautiful.
  • This is a privacy nightmare!
  • Explain please.
  • It takes all your adress book with personal datas, but who says that my contacts wants to share their phone number? And what about other sensitive datas like the email or the adress??
  • ^^agreed!
  • Your phone number isn't private lol.
  • It's not an excuse to have it exposed to everyone to know...
  • Complains to Yellow/White Pages.
  • Sounds like Waze for the dialer. I kind of like it as long as the spam identification is reliable. I wouldn't want it pre-installed though.
  • Bull shyt smelling again.....
    What's the essence of trying to solve Indian market problems by including a damn app for all OEM (HUAWEI) units :-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-)
  • I tried it for a couple months but found it too intrusive. Waiting for Nougat's native call blocking feature.
  • Why on gods green earth has it taken Google 13 Android versions to include a call block feature?
  • People with the best engineering or programming skills are not always the most intuitive.
  • Blocking has been a feature of HTC dialer for years.
  • Can be useful in identifying spam calls. But AVG doesn't like it. It says it's a threat.
  • It will be that "U2" all over again.
  • They will hit critical mass and then sellout by taking $ to whitelist a marketer's number. Some ad blockers do this too.
  • Is there a way to uninstall it? Posted via my Moto X Pure Edition using the Android Central App
  • I don't know about Honor's implementation but when I had the same integration in OnePlus One I had to -
    1. Uncheck Truecaller in the dialer settings
    2. Uninstall the app
    3. Also, disable/uninstall the Truecaller service in Settings.