Starting on May 2022 Google banned all call recording apps from the store, as noted by NLL on a reddit post. This continues a trend of Google disabling the Voice Line audio source starting on Android 10, essentially killing any high quality recording of calls.

For reasons irrelevant to this post I had to prepare a phone with call recording capabilities to a relative of mine so I decided to test which combination of phone and software settings would work the best. I will be using the free and open source call recording app “Android Call Recording” (Get it on F-Droid or check its homepage) and the audio samples were taken for this Qxir video.

Android 9 (Nokia 5)

This terminal is the best case scenario for call recordings, it is a fairly old phone still running Android 9 and it allows Voice Line recording.

Recording wise it is just perfect, but this old phone, with barely 4GB of free storage will be pretty useless for our purposes.

Android 11 (Nokia 8.3 5G)

This is the phone I’m considering and of all the available recording methods only the accessibility suite “Voice Recognition” source would record anything at all.

The quality is noticeably worse (mainly due to the audio being much more quiet) but it is clear enough to be understandable. As an advantage, this is a modern terminal that may be used as a daily driver phone, unlike the old Nokia 5.

Conclusion

It seems Google only wants themselves listening, but we can make do. For now.