You received a missed call, but it wasn’t from one of your contacts; it was just a random number. Before deciding whether to call back, wouldn’t you want to know exactly who called you? That’s the idea behind services like Truecaller. Now, Google seems interested in joining the ‘unknown number lookup’ game inside its Phone app.
In the Google Phone app’s beta version 127.0.620688474, an option labeled “Lookup” has been spotted under numbers from your call log that aren’t in your contacts. When you tap “Lookup,” you get a list of apps on your device that can handle the ‘Web search’ intent, and the Google app is one of them. If you pick the Google app, it will perform a Google search for the number in question. Of course, you’ve always been able to do this manually by copying the number from your call log and pasting it into Google Search.
The intention here seems to allow you to quickly identify businesses that have their contact details indexed by Google and may have called you. However, the usefulness of this feature is impaired since it won’t be able to identify private individuals. So, apps like Truecaller will not be killed by the launch of this new feature.
On the other hand, Truecaller and similar apps could, in theory, integrate themselves into this system. This would let you perform a lookup in their databases once you hit that “Lookup” button, adding more convenience.
This feature has been live in Japan since March and could arrive globally in June.