A year ago somebody opened a thread on r/AndroidQuestions with a title that reads like a small eulogy. Call Notes Pro is no longer supported, he wrote, and asked what else there was.
What he wanted was modest. Somewhere to store details about the people he spoke to on the phone, so he could look back later. Upcoming birthdays. Family news. The ordinary furniture of knowing somebody.
Ten people answered. None of the answers were any good, and I do not blame them, because the lists you find when you search for a Call Notes Pro alternative are pointing at the wrong kind of app entirely.
So this is the post I wish had existed for him. What actually happened to the app, whether you can keep using it, how to get your notes out while you still can, and what genuinely replaces it.
What happened to Call Notes Pro
First, the part that matters: nobody abandoned you.
Call Notes Pro was, and to a degree still is, a good piece of software. More than 100,000 installs. Around 2,200 reviews at 4.4 stars. It showed a floating window during a call with your note and the contact’s details, which remains exactly the right idea.
Its last update was 11 March 2022.
The release note from that day explains why, and it is not the story you expect. The developer wrote that sanctions against Russia and Belarus had caused his database and infrastructure provider to terminate service, so Call Notes Pro Cloud would shut down. He described it as temporary. He also went out of his way to say the Android app itself was unaffected and would keep working normally.
Four years on, the cloud has not come back and the app has not been updated. Yet he was right about the second part.
Does it still work?
Largely, yes, and that surprises people.
A review from late 2025 comes from somebody who has used it for years. The cloud upload is gone, she says, but the developer still offers two ways to import and export your data, and the app itself still does its job. She wishes he had kept it updated. She is still using it.
So if it is installed and working on your current phone, you do not need to do anything today.
One caveat, because it catches people out. That sentence covers the phone you are holding right now. A factory reset, a warranty replacement or a restore onto a new handset all count as a fresh install, and a fresh install is the step that may not be available to you later. So “it still works” is true of this device, not of the next one.
Here is what you have lost, though, and it is worth being precise.
Cloud sync is gone. Notes no longer travel between your devices, and the web access that came with it went at the same time.
Nothing gets fixed. Four years without a release means four years of Android changes the app has never been adjusted for.
The listing is frozen in 2022. It still promises support from Lollipop up to Android 12. Several Android versions have shipped since.
The reason to move sooner rather than later
There is a quieter problem, and it is the one that will decide this for you.
Google Play requires apps to keep their target Android version reasonably current. When an app falls too far behind, Play stops offering it to new users on newer phones. The app already installed on your handset keeps running, but a fresh install on a new device becomes difficult and eventually impossible.
An app untouched since March 2022 sits well outside that window.
So the risk is not that Call Notes Pro stops working on Tuesday. It is that you replace your phone in eighteen months, go to reinstall it, and find you cannot. That is a bad afternoon to start planning a migration, especially with years of notes involved.
Which brings me to the thing you should do this week regardless of what you decide.
Export your notes now
Do this before you read the rest of the post. It takes five minutes.
The developer left the export in place deliberately, and it still works. Open the app, go into its settings, and find the export or backup option. Send the file somewhere that is not the phone. Email it to yourself, drop it in Drive, anything that survives a lost handset.
Then open the file and actually look at it. Check the notes came across, not just the names and numbers, because the notes are the part you cannot recreate.
Do this even if you intend to carry on using the app for another three years. The export is the only copy of your work that does not depend on one ageing installation on one phone.
Moving those notes into Google Contacts
Since you now have an export sitting in a file, here is what to do with it. This is the migration nobody writes up, so take it slowly.
Google Contacts imports a CSV, and its notes field is the destination you care about. Open your export in a spreadsheet first and look at the column headers. You need a column holding the phone number and a column holding the note text.
Then rename the headers to match what Google expects. “Phone 1 – Value” for the number and “Notes” for the note are the two that matter. Google ignores columns it does not recognise, so anything else can stay or go.
Now the important part. Import ten rows first, not the whole file.
Go to Google Contacts on a desktop, choose Import, and feed it a trimmed copy containing a handful of records. Open two or three of the imported contacts and confirm the note text actually landed in the notes field rather than vanishing. Only when that looks right should you import the rest.
You will almost certainly end up with duplicates, because the import matches loosely and your existing contacts already exist. Google Contacts has a Merge and fix tool for precisely this, and it is better than doing it by hand. Run it afterwards and review what it proposes before accepting.
Once that is done, the notes are in your Google account. They sync to every device you sign into, they export again whenever you want, and no single company’s infrastructure decision can strand them a second time.
Why the alternative lists send you wrong
Now the part that makes searching for this so frustrating.
Look up Call Notes Pro alternatives on AlternativeTo, the site that ranks for exactly this question, and the top suggestions are Truecaller, Getcontact and FCorp ID Book.
Those are caller identification apps. Their job is telling you who an unknown number belongs to, using a crowdsourced database of strangers, mostly so you can avoid spam.
That is close to the opposite of what Call Notes Pro did.
Call Notes Pro showed you your own note about somebody you already know. The information came from you. Truecaller cannot help with that, because Truecaller has never met your client and has no idea you promised to send him comps by Thursday.
The confusion is understandable. Both categories put a window on your screen when the phone rings. But one is answering “who is this stranger” and the other is answering “what did I say to this person last time”, and if you install the first expecting the second you will be disappointed within a day.
What those threads are really asking for
Read the Call Notes Pro refugees and a pattern shows up quickly.
The man who started that Reddit thread wanted birthdays and family news. Not a sales pipeline. He wanted to sound like somebody who remembers you, which is a different goal from closing deals, though it happens to use the same machinery.
A medical device rep posted something similar six months ago. He wanted to streamline his call notes so he could focus more on the conversation, which is the same request from the opposite end. And not trying to remember more. He was trying to think less while somebody was talking.
Neither of them asked for transcription, reporting, pipelines or automation.
If you are still working out what belongs in a note and where it should live, I have written that up separately.
So when you evaluate a replacement, measure it against that and nothing else. Can you get a note in quickly, and does the note appear when the person rings? Everything else on a feature list is somebody else’s requirement.
What actually replaces it
Three honest options, in increasing order of cost.
Google Contacts on its own. Free, already on your phone, no contact limit, exports cleanly. Put the note in the contact’s notes field and it syncs everywhere you sign in. The catch is retrieval: your phone will not show you that note while it is ringing, so you are opening the contact after the fact. I have written the full version of running a client list out of Google Contacts if you want the field-by-field setup.
A real CRM. Thirty to fifty dollars a month buys you reminders, pipeline, reporting and team handoff, none of which Call Notes Pro ever had. If two or more of those matter, stop reading and go and buy one. Whether a one-person business actually needs that is a longer argument I have made in a separate post on whether you need a CRM as a realtor.
An app that does the specific thing. Shows your own note on the incoming call screen, before you answer. That is the narrow category Call Notes Pro was in, and it is thinly populated, which is why that Reddit thread went nowhere. I have since compared the four apps called call notes row by row, if you want them next to each other.
My own app, and how it differs
I should be straight with you. I am a working real estate agent, I built one of those apps, and that is the reason I know this niche well enough to write about it.
Business Dialer puts your Google Contacts note on the incoming call screen. Name, company, job title and your note, before you pick up. Stock Android prints none of that, for reasons I set out in the post on the company name and the incoming call screen. Edit it during or after the call and it writes straight back to Google Contacts.
The design difference from Call Notes Pro is the one that matters here, so let me be blunt about it. Call Notes Pro kept your notes in its own database and synced them through its own cloud. When that cloud went, your notes were stranded on a phone. My app has no cloud at all. Notes live in your Google account, which means they sync through Google, they export through Google, and if I disappear tomorrow every note is still sitting where you left it.
That is not cleverness on my part. I watched what happened to him.
It costs $9 a month, $49 a year, or $99 once, with a 30 day trial and no free tier. Android only.
Where Call Notes Pro still beats it
Four things it did that mine does not, and you should know them before you switch.
Reminders. It had proper scheduled and recurring reminders tied to a number. Mine has none. If you built your follow-up system on that, you will miss it badly.
Notes on unknown numbers. You could annotate a number that was not in your address book. Mine works from your contacts, so an unsaved number needs saving first.
Heavy customisation of the popup. Position, font size, colours. Mine is far more opinionated.
Remote CRM lookups. It could request notes from a CRM server. That was a genuinely advanced feature for a solo app.
If those first two are load-bearing for you, keep the app you have and export regularly. That is a reasonable decision and I would rather you made it knowingly.
If you want to keep using it
Perfectly defensible. Three precautions, though.
Export your notes monthly, or at least whenever you remember. Treat the file as the real copy and the app as a convenience.
Never let it be the only place a commitment lives. If you promised somebody a call on Monday, that belongs in a calendar too.
And before you set up a new phone, install it and confirm it still works while your old handset is still in your hand. Discovering the problem with the old phone already wiped is how people lose years of notes.
The short version
Call Notes Pro was not abandoned by a careless developer. Its infrastructure was taken away by sanctions, he said so plainly at the time, and he kept the app and its export working afterwards. It deserves better than the way people talk about it.
Export your notes this week. That is the only urgent item.
Ignore the alternative lists that point you at Truecaller. Caller identification tells you about strangers. You wanted something that remembers what you said to people you already know, and those are different products.
Then decide whether you need reminders, in which case buy a CRM, or whether you mainly need the note in front of you when the phone rings. If it is the second, put the notes in Google Contacts first, because that way they belong to you no matter whose software you end up using.
