Truecaller 2.0 – Turning features into service

Hello friends,

We have been hard at work with Truecaller 2.0 and now the pieces are starting to fall into place. You will notice that with the new release we have tried to extend the reach of Truecaller so that everyone will be able to

use

it and

contribute

to it. This post is dedicated to explain the difference between what we want Truecaller to be.

In the light of the recent success with our iPhone application we have come to realize like many other that we can still be innovative within our service on a platform that is limited in terms of accessible APIs. But instead of making this a discussion about platforms we want to emphasis of the previous sentence to be service. As we see it Truecaller has had one service and several features previously. Our service was of course the Caller ID which lets you see the name of a caller whenever you receive a call from a number not already in your phonebook. However we continued adding several other features such as the very handy update phonebook feature. But that was part of the problem, this was a feature and not a service. You could run it once and you’d be surprised about how good it was. But what next?

So the question we had to ask ourselves was how we could turn our current array of features into an array of services? Well, we started by going back to the roots of why we added each single feature. With the help of our co-workers we thought about each feature and how we could turn it into a utopia, meaning how could we turn this feature into the best that it could be. Then we started looking at how much of that was actually possible? The answer was surprisingly sweet because most if not all of the features were possible in some degree!

The last step of this reinvention was the most delicate one where we have to decide on how to formalize the look and feel of our new services for each platform. This is where it gets tricky as your suddenly thrown into the notion of function vs usability and still keep a familiar face across platforms. So for all of you wondering how Truecaller is going to evolve from 1.0 to 2.0 all I can say is that I sincerely believe anyone using Truecaller 2.0 on any of the supported platforms will be surprised, because we are on our way to utopia!