Google’s working on making it easier to find calls you’ve recorded (APK teardown)

Being able to easily record a voice call is exactly the sort of thing a smartphone should be useful for, but messy legal concerns keep the feature from being nearly as ubiquitous as it should be. Google’s got it’s own solution baked right in to its dialer — the Phone app — but even that’s far more complicated than we’d like, with Pixel users not able to access call recording at all, and Google being a little opaque about exactly where it is available. While that’s probably not about to change anytime soon, we do have some progress to share, as Google works on a tweak that could make accessing your call recordings a lot easier.

Let’s say you’re lucky enough to actually have access to call recording in Phone. Checking out the changes Google implemented in version 189.0.798816824-publicbeta-pixel2024 of the app, we’ve uncovered some initial work towards a new way to find recorded calls.

Now it looks like Phone is also planning to provide users with the same sort of filter for calls that have been recorded.

While we haven’t yet been able to try this out with actual recordings in the call log, we are able to get the option to appear, although you won’t see this in the app’s public release.

Especially if you’re not automatically recording most calls, that could be a quick way to get to those that were important enough for you to preserve them in the first place.

Although Pixel phones can’t take advantage of regular Phone app call recording, fans of Google’s hardware did get access to a variant of this feature last year with the launch of Call Notes for the Pixel 9. That system both records your calls and attempts to provide a transcription. We’re not yet sure if these will also show up alongside standard call recordings when using this call log filter, but it’s entirely possible they do. For now, we’re just going to have to wait for some further developer progress before we’re able to give this a proper test.