Facebook working on new app for android smartphones

23 Mar 2015

Facebook has been testing a new Android-only dialler app which would include advanced call blocking in a smartphone, reports say.

According to the Android Police and other reports, the app, marked 'FB-only', would show information about the caller and automatically block calls from commonly blocked numbers.

Facebook has confirmed the existence of the app called 'Phone', and said that they were always testing things but had no announcements to make yet.

This does not mean that Facebook is launching its own FB-branded smartphone. It is a service on smartphones, the details of which were accidentally leaked via a server-side update to the Facebook app, which was fixed quickly.

According to Android Police, the new app is called Phone. The description briefly found within Facebook's app indicated that you could "install or update" Phone to try it out.

PC magazine found that tapping on the option to install or update to Phone did nothing, since Phone (with a FB-ONLY tag appended to the name) is likely something that only Facebook employees can access internally.

However, the description of Phone seems to indicate that the app, which is likely just an app meant to replace your smartphone's standard dialling functionality, would allow users to receive information about who is calling them whenever the call comes in. Details remain unclear.