Why you can no longer record calls on Android

Remember when call recording apps worked perfectly? It’s been raining ever since, as the journey through the wilderness of these apps began in Android 9 Pie and has gotten significantly worse since then.

Call recording survives, but at half speed and in many conditions. What exactly happened to call recording on Android so that we get there?

Can you record calls or not?

To the question of whether you can record calls on Android, we have to answer with the same answer as so many other operating system questions: it depends. Applications to record calls They work…sort of, sometimes. In most cases, without root, applications record sound using the phone’s microphone, so the quality leaves something to be desired. They work, they work, but not very well.

The best thing that can happen to you is that your mobile comes standard with call recording, something that happens for example in Google Pixel, Samsung, Huawei and other brands, because then the recording is saved with the internal audio of the phone, that is, with perfect quality. The problem is that manufacturers only enable call recording in certain countries. Neither Google nor Samsung have it active in Europe, although it is legal even without consent, provided you do not disseminate them.

So, is it possible to record calls on Android? Yes and no. If you are lucky and have a cell phone with call recording and live in a country where it is active, then yes. Otherwise, you can use apps to continue recording calls, but they work regularly.

What happened to call recording

How did we get here, if ten years ago you could record calls with Android Lollipop without a problem? It wasn’t something overnight, but version after version was brewed.

The problem is that Android has never had a reliable and secure mode for third-party apps to record calls. workarounds, or tips to achieve this. Since Android Marshmallow, these applications had to use unofficial APIs to capture audio. It was still one To hack and something dangerous in the wrong hands, so Google limited its use starting with Android Pie.

With no way, official or unofficial, to capture phone audio, recording apps have since had to make do with record incoming audio with a microphoneof lower quality, and depend on accessibility services to function more or less reliably.

The problem is that use accessibility services to record calls I haven’t stopped being someone else To hack and finally Google decided: accessibility services are intended for accessibility and not for call recording. As a result, recording apps that used them had to leave Google Play.

Only a handful of call recording apps remain on Google Play, like the legendary ACR app, although by not being able to use the accessibility permission, They don’t work on the latest versions of Android. When opening the ACR downloaded from Google Play on a recent mobile, we get the following notification:

Call recording apps today can only capture audio in two ways: with accessibility permissions (and therefore cannot be on Google Play) and with root (in theory allowed on Google Play) . Both cases are not very optimal for the general public, which is why the developers have recently chosen the middle path: replace the Phone app with one that records calls. So, the creator of ACR Recorder launched ACR Phone.

ACR Phone still requires accessibility permission to capture audio, but does not include it in its app on Google Play because that would be against Google’s policies. Instead, its developer created a separate application distributed outside of Google Play, ACR Phone Helper, which uses accessibility permissions to enable call recording on ACR Phone. If you have root, it’s even better, because it also works as a Magisk module to record actual internal audio and not through the microphone.

In summary, Google blocked all methods to record callsboth from the operating system itself (with the restriction of undocumented APIs of Android 10) and from Google Play policies, so much so that the only way to continue recording calls on Android, if your mobile doesn’t have them as standard, it’s pretty bad: you have to install apps outside of Google Play and the quality will only be good if you have root.

So if you want to record calls on your Android mobile The best thing that can happen to you is that it comes standardotherwise you will need root to have full quality recording or applications downloaded from outside Google Play that use accessibility services (with the security risks they imply) and with improvable quality .

And for the moment It looks like things will stay this way, because despite closing all possibilities for third-party applications to record calls, Google does not offer a new civilized way (with permission, for example) to do this in the latest versions of Android. Did you get lost with all the variations? Here is a summary :

• If your mobile comes with recording as standard: You will be able to record calls in full quality if you have it active in your country.
• If your mobile phone does not have serial recording: You can use third-party apps downloaded outside of Google Play that use accessibility permissions to record calls using the microphone, at lower quality.
• If you have root: You can force calls to be recorded with optimal quality, whether it is standard or not.

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