Google's dialer handles spam warnings, caller ID and blocking for everyone, but Call Screen, Hold for Me, call recording and transcription depend on your phone and region.
3.9 / 5
Phone by Google is Google's calling app: the screen where you dial, see recent calls, pick favourites and handle voicemail. It is free, and the listing shows no purchases or subscription. Its pitch is less about placing calls than about managing the ones you receive.
The core is spam handling and caller ID. The app warns you when a caller looks suspicious, lets you block a number, and shows the name of a business calling when Google knows it. That is useful on any phone that can install it, and it is the part of the offer with no regional footnote attached.
Call Screen has the app answer unknown callers, filter out detected spammers and show you more about the caller before you pick up. Hold for Me has Google Assistant wait on a business's hold line and tell you when a person arrives. Visual voicemail lets you play messages in any order and read transcriptions. Call recording saves calls to the phone and plays a disclosure to everyone on the line. There is also emergency support that shares your location and details with an operator without speaking.
The listing's footnotes matter more than the feature list. Most of these are marked as available only on some devices with Phone pre-installed. Automatic screening is US and English only. Transcription is US and English only. Hold for Me is US only, limited to Pixel 2 and later and to toll-free numbers, and the developer admits it may miss some hold situations. Emergency support covers only Australia, the UK and the US. Someone installing this on a non-Pixel phone outside the US should expect the spam and caller ID side and not much of the rest.
If you have a Pixel or another phone that ships with it, this is the dialer to keep and its extras are the reason. If you are on another brand and swapping in a dialer to get call recording or screening, read the footnotes first, because those are the features most likely to be absent. The listing also concedes that Call Screen may not catch every spam call, so treat the protection as a filter and not a guarantee.
It also covers only calling. Contacts and texting live in separate apps such as Contacts and Google Messages, so this is one piece of a Google set and not a replacement for all of it. It is a sound free dialer with a good spam story, held back by how much of its best material depends on your hardware and your country.
By Mei-Lin Chua
Contributing editor, apps and storefronts ·
Phone by Google
com.google.android.dialer
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