How to Record Calls on Android and Why You Can not Do It Anymore

How to Record Calls on Android and Why You Can not Do It Anymore

Was there ever a period when call recording apps were perfect? It’s been a long time since then, as the journey through these apps started with Android 9 Pie and got worse with subsequent Android releases.

Although there are some restrictions, call recording is still in use. What exactly happened to call recording on Android to get to this point?

To the question of whether you can record calls on Android, we must answer in the same way as we answer many other questions about the operating system: it depends. Call recording apps work to some extent, sometimes. In most cases, without root, the apps record audio using the phone's microphone, so the quality leaves a lot to be desired. They work, but not very well.

The best thing that can happen to you is if your phone has a built-in call recording feature. This is the case with the Google Pixel, Samsung, Huawei, and other brands, for instance, because the recording is saved with the phone's internal audio, meaning it is in perfect quality. The problem is that manufacturers only allow call recording in certain countries. Neither Google nor Samsung activates these applications in some countries, although they are legal even without consent, as long as you do not distribute them.

Is it possible to record calls on Android? Yes and no. If you are lucky enough to have a phone with a call recording feature and live in a country where this feature is available, the answer is yes. If not, you can use apps to continue recording calls, but they work poorly.

- What happened to call recording?

How did we get to this point, when you could record calls without problems using Android Lollipop over a decade ago? It didn't happen overnight.

The problem is that Android has never had a reliable and secure way to allow third-party apps to record calls, so these apps initially used workarounds to do so. Starting with Android Marshmallow, these apps had to use unofficial APIs to capture audio. This was still a hack and dangerous in the wrong hands, so Google limited its use starting with Android Pie.

In the absence of an official or unofficial way to capture audio from a phone, recording apps have since had to make do with recording incoming audio using the microphone, at lower quality, and relying on accessibility services to work properly. 

The problem is that using Accessibility Services to record calls was just another hack, and Google finally came clean: Accessibility Services is for accessibility, not call recording. As a result, the recording apps that used it had to be removed from the Google Play Store.

There are only a few call recording apps left on Google Play, such as the legendary ACR Recorder, although due to its inability to use Accessibility permission, it does not work on the latest versions of Android. When we open ACR Recorder downloaded from Google Play on a modern mobile phone, we get the following warning:

Call recording apps can only capture audio in two ways today: with accessibility permissions (and therefore cannot be on Google Play) and with root (which is theoretically allowed on Google Play). Neither of these situations is very ideal for the general public, so developers have recently chosen the middle path: replacing the phone app with another call recording app. The creator of ACR Recorder has launched ACR Phone, which allows call recording.

ACR Phone still requires Accessibility permission to capture audio, but it doesn’t include it in its Google Play app because it’s against Google’s guidelines. Instead, the app developer has created a separate app that it distributes outside of Google Play, ACR Phone Helper, which uses accessibility permissions to provide call recording to ACR Phone. If you’re rooted, it’s even better, as it acts as a Magisk module to record actual internal audio rather than through the microphone.