There’s a slippery underworld of caller ID services available for Android that will reveal information about an incoming caller, even if you A) don’t subscribe to a carrier caller ID plan or B) the caller has blocked his or her name and number.
Current Caller ID is one of these apps, and has just launched in Canada this week, allowing Android users to expose a little bit more information than the bare minimum. The app has a feature called “unidentified number lookup” that will put a name, and sometimes a face, to those random calls you receive. The feature works within the U.S. and Canada, and will attempt to show you social media information from that person such as the person/company’s last Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn post.
The app integrates nicely with your stock Android dialler, overlaying itself on top of incoming calls. It provides you with charts and statistics such as your most-common calling and texting recipients. There’s also a widget that you can place on your homescreen to identify contacts you interact with most often.
Current Caller ID is made by WhitePages, and is using the company’s extensive directory of North American individuals and businesses. The app is free, and is an interesting way to flesh out your calling and texting tendencies. Its main competitior is CallApp for Android, which won Techcrunch’s Disrupt competition earlier this year. These kinds of apps expose the advantages of third parties being able to more tightly integrate into the Android framework, overlaying themselves on top of system apps like the Dialler. This has been a main advantage of Google’s OS from the beginning and bring forth limitations in Apple’s iOS in terms of sandboxing and limited external integration.
You can download Current Caller ID for free from Google Play.
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