Truecaller introduces iPhone widget support to help you spot spam phone calls more easily

Four months after Truecaller raised $60 million to help you avoid spammers and nuisance calls, the Sweden-based startup has unveiled an overhauled iPhone app that taps the new “widget” functionality of iOS 8.

Founded in 2009, Truecaller has received more than $80 million in funding, and now claims north of 100 million users across Android, iOS, Windows Phone, the web, BlackBerry, and Nokia feature phones. The service is essentially a crowdsourced telephone directory, with users tagging telephone numbers with names — this means anyone who has the Truecaller app installed can see who’s calling before they answer, regardless of whether the number is stored on their phone. It also draws on data from a myriad of different sources such as Yelp to help verify numbers, and can be helpful for identifying “nuisance” or otherwise unwanted “spam” callers.

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With version 5.0 for iPhone, Truecaller sports an all-new design, but it’s perhaps Truecaller Widget Search that’s the most notable upgrade here.

Apple introduced support for widgets with the launch of iOS 8 last year, allowing third-party apps to place alerts and messages in the notification center. For Truecaller, this means users can identify a missed call simply by swiping down. They can also copy a phone number from their call history log, and see whose number it is by dragging down too.

Elsewhere, other new features include the ability to keep your phonebook up-to-date by tapping data and photos from your social media profiles, thus centralizing your contacts in one place — this mirrors an update that was launched for the Android version back in December.

In short, Truecaller wants to keep you inside its app as much as possible, minimizing the need to switch between different contact apps.