Phonewarrior's fight against spam - a year on

The mobile phone is such a personal device, and spammy messages on it really... gets to you. However, there have been many apps that have been working towards filtering spammy messages, and PhoneWarrior is one. It was one of our first App Friday’s candidates, and ever since there have been quite a few additions, to the app and to the company.

Phonewarrior has recently added on Vaibhav Padlikar as their co-founder and as a leader of their engineering team. The former Adobe Systems exec, now leads on defining the company’s technology and product roadmap. We recently spoke to him to understand PhoneWarriors latest numbers. And we weren’t disappointed!

Some important numbers

PhoneWarrior used to crowdsource the numbers of spammers, which at the time we heard of it, thought of it to be a very scalable model with respect to system intelligence, which would lend itself to app downloads. A year on, the numbers that Vaibhav shared as PhoneWarrior’s usage statistics proved this point -

• A global telephone directory of more than 100 million numbers.
• 100,000+ caller ID lookups daily.
• Successful Identification of a million plus unknown callers for its users.
• Over 2k+ downloads per day with Android contributing to around 50%+ of this.
• Around 0.5 million downloads in 132 countries including India, Indonesia, US, UK and South Africa.
• Successfully blocked 10m spam SMS and calls.

Vaibhav says, “We now have more than 2,000 downloads per day, with close to 60% of downloads happening on Android. Our download rate has more than doubled in past 4 months. We are also seeing increased customer retention now, and both of them have in turn resulted in exponential growth for daily active users.We are now one of the top apps in our categories on both Android and Blackberry. Some of this increase is also attributed to organic virality. We have also seen an increase in ratings on Google Play.”

Revenue, funding and future

Vaibhav shared that PhoneWarrior will employ a freemium model in the future, but the app is currently free to use - “We are generating some revenue from our Blackberry app based on freemium model. Our Android app is absolutely free as of now, and our focus is to get more users and build a social network through phones,” explains Vaibhav. He also shared that they’ve secured funding from a US-based investor.

However, Vaibhav believes that there’s a lot of potential in what PhoneWarrior can offer. He says, “To understand the landscape, let us first ponder on the fact that there is a huge social network that mirrors real life linkages and is connected through phones. This opportunity is larger than current social graph but is untapped.”

He believes that PhoneWarrior can be more than just a spam blocker. He says, “We have started with spam as the biggest problem and moved on to caller ID. We have realized that caller ID is a big problem in itself and we would like to enhance the product so as to improve on caller ID feature. There are many features on the roadmap which help us with the mission to revolutionise the way mobile phone communication happens by organising the huge social network prevailing on phones.”

These numbers are encouraging and we’ll keep you posted with all of PhoneWarriror’s updates. Download their apps here.