Third-party phone call recording apps are going to have it harder in no time on Android. A new policy coming to the Play Store will prevent third-party phone call recording apps from using its Accessibility API.
The creator of the popular Call Recorder ACR app found out about the arrival of this new policy in early April, as shared on the social platform Reedit, understanding that the new policy states that the “Accessibility API is not designed and cannot be used”. request for audio recording of remote calls.”
With this, Google wants users to cannot make recordings of telephone calls without the knowledge of the other party to the conversations.
A long coming fight
However, this gives advantage to Google’s own call dialing application, which does have a telephone call recording function, being available in those territories where this activity is legal, and which does not use the accessibility API, enabling phone call recordings even without the knowledge of the other party to the conversations.
This movement is part of the fight that Google has been carrying out in recent years against phone call recording applications developed by third parties.
As Android Police commented, since the removal of the official call recording API from Android 6 Marshmallow, and later the removal of other APIs up to Android 9 Pie, developers have been turning to the accessibility services of the Play Store to continue providing telephone call recording functions to its users, so this new step, which will arrive on May 11, will prevent them from continuing to offer them, at least through the Google Play Store.
At the moment it is unknown what the future of these applications may be, if they will be able to work in another way or if they could disappear completely from the Play Store, preventing them from being installed on new mobiles from this application store.
Another possibility could be that Google offers them a grace period so that they can update and adapt to the possible updated requirements. We will see what will happen, since the measure, if there is no change along the way, will come into force in less than a month.
