Google will ban all call recording apps tomorrow
India Today
Google announced banning all call recording apps from the Play store. The change to the Play Store policy will come into effect starting tomorrow, May 11.
Last month, Google announced banning all call recording apps from the Play store. The change to the Play Store policy will come into effect starting tomorrow, May 11. There will be no changes for phones that come with an inbuilt call recording feature.
The Cupertino-based tech giant has been against call recording apps and services for several years. That’s because the company believes recording calls to be an invasion of users’ privacy. Due to the same, the call recording feature on Google’s own Dialer app comes with a loud and clear “this call is now being recorded” alert, heard clearly on both sides before recording begins.
Google has clarified that the change will only affect third-party apps. This means call recording on the Google Dialer will still function if it is available on your device or region. This also clarifies that any preloaded Dialer app with a call recording feature will work perfectly fine.
Only apps with a call recording feature available on the Google Play store will be killed.
A day after Google announced the banning of call recording apps, Truecaller revealed removing the call recording feature from its platform. “As per the updated Google Developer Program policies, we are unable to offer call recordings any longer. This will not affect devices that have call recording built into the device natively,” a Truecaller spokesperson said.
"We had introduced call recording for all Android smartphones based on overwhelming consumer demand. Call Recording on Truecaller was free for everyone, permission-based and required users to enable the feature using the Google Accessibility API,” the spokesperson added.
To recollect, Google blocked real-time call recording on Android 6, and then in-call audio recording over the microphone with Android 10. However, some apps still managed to discover a loophole in Android to access the Accessibility Service to offer the call recording functionality on devices running on Android 10 and above. That forced the tech giant to put a complete ban on all call recording apps available on the Play store.
