Launch of the blog and a short look back at the history of Saracroche

· by Camille Bouvat

Saracroche launches a blog today to share news about the app and the project. There will also be technical articles. For this first post, a look back at the app's history.

March 2025

It all started on a Sunday afternoon, March 23, 2025: in a few hours, the first version of Saracroche was built and published that same evening on the App Store. Apple approved it the next day. The app was ultra-minimalist, more of a prototype than a real app. The first version relied on the prefixes published by ARCEP, covering more than 11 million numbers.

In early April, an article from MacGeneration / iGeneration sent the app soaring to over 5,000 installs in a few days, followed by wide coverage in the press and forums (LinuxFR, MaxiApple, MacPlanète, Compétence Mac, La Fibre.info…).

June 2025

Version 2 shipped after user feedback:

  • A redesigned, more modern interface, organized in tabs.
  • Reporting an unblocked number directly from the app.
  • A settings panel to enable/disable blocking and features.
  • A code refactoring and many bug fixes.

Over 8,000 users installed since launch.

August 2025

On August 15, 2025, Saracroche arrived on Android. Built in native Kotlin with Jetpack Compose (no cross-platform port) after a 14-day closed test with around twenty testers, the app was officially published on the Google Play Store. That same month, iOS passed 20,000 installs. Both platforms share the same number database, but remain two fully independent apps technically.

November 2025

  • Saracroche joined F-Droid, after nearly two months of back-and-forth with the team (dependency cleanups, reproducible builds). It was only natural for free software to be on F-Droid.
  • The saracroche.org website went live, with a dedicated server to collect user reports.
  • A business offering was launched to protect mobile fleets from telemarketing and phishing.

The 60,000-user milestone was reached.

March 2026

On March 23, 2026, Saracroche turned one:

  • 316,000 downloads on Google Play and 233,000 on the App Store.
  • 180,000 reports recorded in the app.
  • SMS filtering arrived on iOS (messages moved to the Junk folder of the Messages app).

iOS version 4 aimed at a major overhaul: background updates, chunked list installation, better app/extension communication, memory limits. Short on time and eager to ship, it was finalized with the help of an LLM: the delivered code was riddled with bugs: "I no longer recognized my own code". Since then, a hybrid approach: AI helps function by function, as a "second opinion", no autocomplete, with open-weight models (hi Mistral AI).

May 2026

On May 8, 2026, Saracroche passed 1,070,000 cumulative downloads (excluding F-Droid, Obtainium and other alternative sources). This growth came from the press, word of mouth, install parties - and even a recommendation from the Meuse gendarmerie.

To mark the milestone, Android version 4 introduced SMS filtering. On Android, no API lets a third-party app integrate with the native SMS app: two paths were ruled out (becoming the default SMS app, or Google Play's anti-spam validation), the chosen solution is notification capture.

Summer 2026

Version 5 brought both platforms to parity: Android on June 30, iOS on September 1. The delay comes from CallKit's complexity, which requires sending lists block by block through an intermediate representation table.

New features:

  • Multi-list management (uBlock Origin style): individually toggleable lists, with priorities, personal lists first.
  • Community lists, updated daily from reports, i.e. 900,000 in a year.
  • A business dashboard to manage fleets (via MDM or standalone).
  • The reverse phone lookup on saracroche.org, backed in part by OpenStreetMap (over 450,000 businesses and places) and cartes.app.

Today

As of November 12, Saracroche is 2.7 million users, a database of around 16 million unwanted numbers, and an app that is still free, ad-free and open source. The saracroche.org website is also available in several languages.

Thanks 😘 to everyone who reports numbers, leaves reviews, shares the app… and supports the project with a donation!

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