Have you experienced that awkward moment when — after turning your “Do Not Disturb” message off — you had a missed call from an unfamiliar number? If so, you know that it’s a pain to figure out who owns that number so that you can call it back and coordinate the conversation accordingly.
Of course, there are ways to at least have a hint about the phone number’s owner: you can either use apps like WhitePages, Number Guru, and PrivacyStar, or you can give it your best shot and Google it.
The only problem with the above is that you are losing precious minutes, while you should be focusing your energy on more productive actions than looking up a phone number just to find out that maybe it was your ex with a phone number you didn’t know. Oh, and by the way, you might find that those apps need a database update, which makes them useless in your case.
What makes sense in our scenario is an always-up-to-date phone-number database. Fortunately, there is an app for that (do you recall that memorable iPhone 3G commercial?) It’s called CallerSmart.
The free iOS app available for the iPhone can be described as Waze for Caller ID: it’s a community-fed, always-up-to-date phonebook with 600 million phone numbers and 225,000 active users. What this means in real life after you receive a phone call from an unknown number is the following:
You launch CallerSmart, start searching for the number, and get information about it. You then read comments and get a spam meter (this is based on the collective user feedback about a certain phone number). The guys behind CallerSmart tell me that there are more than 40,000 searches per day.
CallerSmart was completely rebuilt for iOS 8.3 for a neat user experience. The update (version 6.0) was released today and it is available now in the App Store. CallerSmart is a free app, but it offers in-app purchases starting at $2.99, so be sure to check them out to unlock the complete feature set.
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