Communication v4.0.0
Saracroche is a free Android call blocker using France's telemarketing registry to silently reject known spam numbers before ringing. Requires call screening permission, refreshes lists on Wi-Fi, and may miss spoofed or new numbers.
Saracroche is a lightweight Android call blocker built around France's telemarketing number registry. Instead of asking you to blacklist numbers one by one, it filters incoming calls against a local list of millions of known canvassing lines and silently rejects matches before your phone even rings.
Installation is quick; forgetting the system role is what trips most people up. On Android 10 and newer, Saracroche has to be granted the call screening permission, and you approve that inside the phone's dialer settings rather than inside the app itself. Skip that step and the interface still looks healthy, yet not a single call gets filtered. Once activated, the number list downloads one time and then refreshes periodically in the background. I restricted refreshes to Wi-Fi, so my mobile data consumption stayed at essentially nothing.
The first few days are strangely silent, and that silence is the whole point. Weekday calls from unfamiliar landline numbers around lunchtime simply stop arriving — no ring, no vibration, no missed-call badge waiting on the lock screen. Attempts still land in the dialer's call log if you go hunting for them, which is a handy way to confirm the service is alive. Callers usually hear one short ring or nothing at all, depending on their operator.
Resources are a non-issue. The download sits under a few megabytes, there is no account to register, and no advertising interrupts the flow. Battery drain has been invisible on my device, though the app has to stay exempt from aggressive battery savers on Xiaomi, Oppo and Huawei builds. Otherwise Android quietly suspends the screening service after a few idle days and you never notice until the pitches return.
The biggest limitation is baked into how list-based filtering works: it only recognizes numbers that are already known. A freshly assigned call center line, or a spoofed number wearing a familiar French mobile prefix, sails straight through until enough reports pile up. There is also no caller name lookup, so an unrecognized number that does ring leaves you guessing. Anyone hoping to see who is on the line before answering should look at a full caller-ID product instead.
False positives exist too. Delivery dispatchers and shared company lines get flagged by enough people over time, which means a call you genuinely wanted can be rejected. Saving that number to your contacts fixes it permanently, since contacts are never blocked, but you typically learn about the problem only after something has already been missed.
If you hold a French number and your week is punctuated by insurance pitches, solar panel offers and energy "audits," the change is felt immediately. Saracroche keeps that noise out with almost zero upkeep, which is unusual for something free and open source. Outside France the registry has little relevance, and anyone who needs SMS filtering or spam-text handling should pair it with a separate utility. One narrow job, done quietly.
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