A dialer that quietly swaps out your home screen: Caller Plus only got 30k installs, while the template it copied has already reached 3M

Caller Plus is a pretty ordinary dialer on Google Play: keypad, contacts, call log, manual number blocking, plus a built-in "launcher" that can be set as the phone's default home screen. It launched in Sep 11, reached 8k installs in 31 weeks, and has zero ratings. Its volume was bought in waves. The app itself isn't worth copying. What's worth watching is the template it follows: "dialer / SMS + default home screen." Over the past year a batch of small Indian studios has copied it dozens of times. The lead app has 3M installs and an estimated revenue of over $50k a month. The problem is that this business depends on users being unable to switch back to their old home screen. The route is getting more crowded, and Google enforcement is not far off.

A one-star review with 112 people finding it helpful

In Sep 13, a user named Kaitao Lai left this review of Messenger: SMS Home Launcher on Google Play: "I agreed to set it as my launcher, but it never made clear that it would flood my home screen with unrelated ads and promoted games. That's misleading and very intrusive. I uninstalled it right away." 112 people marked it helpful.

Aug 30 Another user put it more bluntly: "My screen is unrecognizable now. I just wanted to send a text to a friend, and this freaking app not only didn't let me send it, it rearranged all my apps. Undo! Undo! Undo!"

This app has 3.04M installs, 7,800 reviews, and a 4.2 rating on Google Play (US store listing, 11-06). The developer address is at the very bottom of the page: a residential building in Mota Varachha, Surat, Gujarat, India.

It's the one that copies Caller Plus.

What Caller Plus is

Store description, verbatim: "Simple dialer, call blocker, spam protection, contacts, call log, and a built-in Home Launcher." The "spam protection" in the description mentions no number database and no caller ID. Reading it, it's manual blocking. Marked "Contains ads," with an in-app purchase at "$4.99 per item."

A few details show how it was built:

• Piggybacking on a name. The package name is com.callapp.dialer.callerid.contacts, sitting right next to CallApp (com.callapp.contacts, 434M installs on Play). The store title stuffs in three search terms: Caller, Block Spam, and Home.
• A nearly free storefront. The website is a Blogger page, callerapphome.blogspot.com, with just a privacy policy and terms, posted Sep 8. The terms misspell the product name as "Phone Dialor Launcher app." The contact email is a personal gmail, and the developer account "Tools App Creator" hosts only this app.
• Barely maintained after launch. Last version 1.1; no updates after Oct 16.

How the 30k installs happened

Data from Google Play. Before mid-October it's third-party estimates, spread evenly between observations.

The curve doesn't look like organic growth. From Oct 5 to 7, it added only a few to a few dozen people a day, then on the 8th it suddenly added 4,145. It looks more like ads being switched on and off in waves (inference; I didn't see its ads). It's not searchable on TikTok. Nobody on X has mentioned it in nearly 60 days. Apart from auto-indexed pages on CNET Download and Softonic, no one has written about it.

It has only charted in the communication free charts of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, ranking between 72 and 137 (11-06: Saudi 81, UAE 109). In early November it briefly showed up around #180 on the same charts in Vietnam and Canada. The Gulf category charts have low entry thresholds: a few hundred installs a day gets you into the top 100.

31k installs, and not a single rating on Play. Maybe the app never prompts for a rating, or maybe people leave quickly. I didn't confirm which.

Why bundle a home screen

Dialers and SMS apps are among the most crowded categories on Play. There's the built-in Google Phone (5.9B installs), Truecaller (1.9B), and CallApp. How does a small studio's dialer survive? The answer is the built-in home screen.

• Every Home press opens it. Once it's set as the default launcher, users see it on every unlock and every return to the home screen. A normal dialer gets opened a few times a day; a home screen gets opened dozens or hundreds of times. Ad impressions and retention operate on different scales.
• Hard to uninstall. Most people don't know how to switch the home screen back. In Sep 15, rottenwifi.com published a guide, "How to remove Messenger Home and restore your Samsung One UI home screen." Its first line: "If a third-party app replaced your Samsung home screen, you're most likely dealing with Messenger Home or a similarly named launcher." Someone wrote a dedicated tutorial for this, which suggests plenty of people have had their home screen swapped.
• Posing as a dialer or SMS app is how it gets permissions. Play only lets default dialer or default SMS apps read call logs and texts. Make yourself a dialer or SMS app first, and the permissions are justified. Then ask for the default home screen on the side.
• The money is visible. The third-party estimator AppGoblin puts the top app, Messenger: SMS Home Launcher, at 294k monthly actives and over $50k in monthly revenue, 58% from in-app purchases and 42% from ads, with AdMob mediation and 5 other ad networks. Caller Plus's $4.99 in-app purchase is probably the same kind of "remove ads / premium" (inference).

How crowded it is

Apps whose titles mix home/launcher with call/sms/contact/dial/spam and were listed on Play after June 2025 number about 38, totaling about 8.4M installs (Google Play, 11-06). New listings keep climbing: 2026 in August 6, 10 in September, 6 in October.

Google Play installs, 11-06.

Launcher: Phone & Messages, listed the same day as Caller Plus, is already at 259k, 8 times its size. The two are nearly identical products; the gap comes from ad budget and creative, not the product.

These apps also share a nearly identical front: a blogspot website, a personal gmail, and developer names often unrelated to the product, like "Dimazo Kitchenware," "RADHE FABRICS," or "Happy Birthday Song Greeting Cards Maker." The surnames in the emails (moradiya, thummar, ramoliya, golakiya) are mostly common Gujarati surnames, and the top app's developer address is in Surat. So this is probably a pipeline from utility-app studios around Surat, plus "renting a name to publish" (inference; I didn't verify each one).

Is there a legitimate version of this approach?

Yes. Homescreen Apps (EET Apps) listed Easy Homescreen in January 2023. It's a large-text home screen for older people, with 24.4M installs on Play. It reached #1 in the US personalization free chart, and AppGoblin estimates over $100k in monthly revenue, 77% from in-app purchases. The same company also has Email Homescreen, with 2.85M installs.

Both use the same lever: make a function the default home screen. The difference is that EET's users already want a new home screen and know what they installed. The Surat apps' users think they're installing a dialer or SMS app, and "set as home" is a tap they agreed to without thinking. The first can last. The second depends on users being unable to switch back, and users are already searching for uninstall guides. Sooner or later it runs into Google's policies on deceptive defaults and disruptive ads (I found no case of bulk removals so far).

If it were you

The short verdict: don't compete with Caller Plus, and don't squeeze into the "dialer / SMS + home screen" template again. What you can learn is the lever: on Android, make a high-frequency function the default home screen.

Who it fits: small teams who can build for Android and buy Google app ads, and who are willing to build a home screen that users actually want for a clearly defined audience. For example: other language versions of large-text home screens for older users (EET works in English), a reading-focused home screen for a religious community, a parental-control home screen for kids, or a work home screen for delivery riders and drivers.

Who it doesn't fit: people hoping to make quick money by copying the Surat template. Each month brings 6 to 10 new copies. The earliest ones already took the easy wins, and later entrants can only compete on ad budget. The approach also depends on users never switching the home screen back, so the policy risk falls on the late copiers. People without ad-buying experience shouldn't try either: this category has no organic traffic, and there's no discussion on TikTok or X.

How to build it: let users choose the home screen deliberately. Don't slip it in during dialer setup. The first screen should say "this will replace your home screen," and settings should include a prominent "restore original home screen." For monetization, follow EET: mainly in-app purchases (lifetime or annual), and keep ads off the home screen. The harshest review on the top app is about exactly this.

How to acquire users: start with countries whose category charts have low thresholds (the Gulf, Canada, Australia, Thailand), run Google app ads in waves to hold the chart rank, and watch day-7 retention. If it's a real home screen, day-7 retention should be clearly higher than a typical utility app. For products with a clear audience (older users, religious communities), add a Facebook campaign aimed at adult children and congregation groups.

Timing: there's no rush. A real home-screen product's window won't close because of these copies. It's better to wait and see whether Google acts against these apps. If it does, there's more room for legitimate versions.

What would show this read is wrong: (1) through the first half of 2027, these "dialer / SMS + home screen" apps keep launching every month and the top ones keep gaining tens of thousands of installs a week with no action from Google. That would mean this gray-market window lasts longer than I think, and copying still pays. (2) The reverse: if Google removes them in bulk, or changes "set as default home screen" into a flow that's harder to tap by accident, the whole "turn a feature into a home screen" lever gets weaker, and even legitimate versions like EET's need reassessing.

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Data and sources: Google Play store pages, install counts, and category charts (2026-10-29 to 11-06; daily figures before mid-October are third-party estimates); the US store listing and developer info for Messenger: SMS Home Launcher (read 11-06); callerapphome.blogspot.com (2026-09-08); AppGoblin revenue estimates; rottenwifi.com (2026-09-15); GetPassive, "How to Monetize a Launcher App on Android" (2026-06). Ad channels, cost per install, what the $4.99 in-app purchase sells, and the developer's location are inference or unverified.