Question

If the application is running in the background, can it save the phone numbers of received calls using CoreTelephony (or similar library)? Is it possible to listen to the incoming call event and make a callback passing data to my application?

CTCallCenter.h seems to have a currentCalls property, but I can’t find a description of it. Anybody know if it has phone numbers in it?

Application called “Mr.Number” seems to have a similar feature, but it’s not available outside of the US so I can’t get it to check the exact functionality.

This seems to be related to Checking incoming call in iphone

Answer 1

Currently no.

There are lots of problems:

1. CTCallCenter call tracking does NOT give you the phone number of the call.
2. Call tracking does not really work in the background (it works while you have a background task, but once that finish the app will not get any call CTCallCenter call-backs).
3. currentCalls is a list of all current calls at that point in time and no they don’t give you the phone number.

I looked into “Mr.Number” application to see if it actually does support such features. It doesn’t track phone calls at all. I found this quote from their blog:

While we’re on the subject, we get a
lot of questions about why our iPhone
app doesn’t have all the functionality
of our Android and BlackBerry
versions. We hear you. We’d love to
offer call blocking, true caller ID,
or at the very least the ability to
look up numbers from your recent calls
without having to copy and paste them
from your call log into Mr. Number.
Unfortunately, none of this is
possible on the iPhone today without
jailbreaking. When Apple gives us APIs
to do so, we promise to bring all the
features of our Android and BlackBerry
apps to iPhone