As you may have seen in the notes for Reverse Lookup in the past, we’ve received sporadic reports of the app not working properly on some Motorola phones. We always assumed this was due to their Motoblur enhancements, but were surprised that so few complaints came through, and we were never able to replicate the issue ourselves.
One of our astute users, we believe, has finally pinned down the root cause of this issue and provided us with details about how to fix it.
The problem, it turns out, isn’t related to Motoblur, but rather “CITY ID”, a caller id application that is preinstalled on many Verizon/Motorola phones(and possibly others?)
Obviously, we don’t know the inner workings of CITY ID’s code, but from how the application works, we assume it is intercepting incoming call data before Android has a chance to log it into the standard call log database, which is where Reverse Lookup gets it’s information. We assume CITY ID then inserts the call data into the call log, but doesn’t mimic the standard Android dataset closely enough for Reverse Lookup to recognize the incoming calls.
The result would be that users of Reverse Lookup will only see unknown outgoing calls on the apps main screen.
WORKAROUND: If you are experiencing this behavior, you’ll have to make a choice. If you want to continue using CITY ID, you will have to stop using Reverse Lookup(or live with incoming calls not being listed on the main screen.)
If you are not going to continue using CITY ID, you must choose No when it prompts you to subscribe to services after it’s trial period. Postponing your decision will leave CITY ID active in the background and Reverse Lookup will still not function properly.. you MUST choose no so that CIty ID stops intercepting incoming calls.
As always, if you are planning on purchasing the paid version of Reverse Lookup, we encourage you to try the free version first to make sure it works properly on your setup.
—Big thanks to Stephen, who connected the dots and notified us of this conflict.—
