API Crafting Secrets: Into Truecaller API

We better focus on parts, which will bring more value to the product rather than reinventing the wheel. And I should add at this point, 3scale contributed a pretty convenient and reliable wheel for us.

Interview with Umut Alp, Chief Technical Officer of Truecaller. Values the beauty of simplicity especially in highly complicated systems of today.

Tell us more about the development process of  Truecaller API
We have developed a very strong infrastructure for our smartphone clients to make number lookups. The only integration effort was implementing authentication and usage reporting through 3scale SDK and build a REST API end point for the services. The real development effort took less than a day I guess and then we have worked on the developer portal pages a bit more than that.

What are the key components of your core API infrastructure?
The REST endpoint which uses some of the authentication/ security and logging infrastructures already used for our own API endpoints coming from our smartphone clients. And we have offloaded the development and maintenance of quota management and billing to 3scale. So for us, it is no new moving parts. That’s how we had a smooth release and didn’t have any problems so far.

What drove your choices in terms of technology and infrastructure?
Re-use is the main principle for us. We already have a tested and working infrastructure built for all the Truecaller customers. So we are using that in order to serve API requests as well. The only change for us was physically isolating our API customers from the rest of the system, so a possible performance issue won’t affect our API users.

What are the specificities of Truecaller API?
The main principle for us here is keeping it lean and clean. We don’t want to have monstrous API requests and responses coming with a 100 pages documentation. It should be foolproof for the developers to integrate and foolproof for us to develop and maintain.

How can developers get a better taste of what Truecaller API does?
We have setup ActiveDocs for our API endpoints and also compiled a one file documentation for it. We kept it extremely simple both in terms of the number of request types and the number of fields in the response. This way, it is really hard to misinterpret how the API works. Developers can check out our API from our website: https://dev.truecaller.com/

Any roadmap/evolution plan that you can share with us?
Same as above:

1. Find new potential customers

2. Help them to have a seamless integration

3. Get as much feedback from them as possible

4. Improve service quality

5. Start over from step 1

Truecaller is the world’s largest collaborative phone directory to find people from all over the world through name and phone number lookup.