It’s time to say goodbye to your favorite third-party call recording app. Photo: Florence Ion/Gizmodo
Google has been cleaning up the Play Store to weed out bad apps, but it broke some features in the process. If you rely on a specific third-party app for call recording, you may soon lose access to it.
According to Android Police, the developers of the famous call recording ACR app have posted on Reddit to express their dissatisfaction with the upcoming Play Store policy change. Earlier this month, Google announced that it would ban Android apps from using the Accessibility API for call recording beyond their intended use. This is the specific API that developers use to create these applications, although it was not designed for this purpose. As the name suggests, it’s actually an accessibility feature.
Google’s policy on the Accessibility API is that it “is not designed [for] And there is no way to request remote call recording. In other words, the app currently using it for this particular feature technically defies its intended use. The new rules go into effect on May 11, which, quite coincidentally, is also the first day of the Google Developers Conference.
In a follow-up webinar for developers, Google expanded on its policy changes. An employee who hosted the event explained that the new policy affects apps that record calls but don’t explicitly tell others online, which could violate various state laws. Developers who want to maintain this access must add a disclaimer and require explicit consent before call recording, or use a different call recording method.
As a journalist who relies on documenting everything to get it on the record, I can understand how frustrating this news is for people who have to find a new way to bypass their normal workflow. I also understand why Google made this move. As I mentioned, the company has been shutting down its Play Store policies, all in an effort to sell more people on Android devices and the rest of the ecosystem.
Google still allows call recording on its Google Phone app, which some criticized as being unfriendly to developers. But Samsung’s phone app can still record precisely because it doesn’t use the Accessibility API. Regardless, it makes sense for Google to allow its own products to use the Accessibility API it manages. I do wonder if in the future Google will separate the call recording from the accessibility option and reopen it to developers, either to restore their goodwill or just to maintain this feature on Android phones.
