International calling app for Android: call any number over Wi-Fi
Telvio is a free Android app that places calls to ordinary landline and mobile numbers over your internet connection instead of your mobile plan. Rates start at $0.03 a minute, there is no account to create, and the person you call answers a normal phone.
- Keeps your SIM and your number untouched
- Works on Android 7.0 and later
- One free minute on the first call
- Credit never expires
Calling abroad from Android: what each option can actually reach
An Android phone has more ways to place a call than an iPhone does, and most of them still cannot reach the number you want. This is the honest separation, including the ones we compete with.
| Reaches a landline | Leaves your SIM alone | Where the price comes from | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The built-in Phone app | Yes | No | Your carrier's international tariff |
| Your carrier's international add-on | Yes | No | The carrier, per country |
| WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Messenger | No | Yes | Free, app-to-app only |
| Google Voice | Yes | Yes | Needs a US number to set up |
| Microsoft Teams (former Skype credit) | Partly | Yes | Leftover credit, no new top-ups |
| Telvio | Yes | Yes | From $0.03/min, shown before you dial |
Your phone already dials. Here is what changes.
An Android phone places a call through the mobile network its SIM is registered on, and the price of that call is set by the carrier that issued the SIM. Domestically that is usually free, because it comes out of an allowance. The moment the number you dial sits in another country, or the moment you are standing in another country, a different tariff applies — the international rate, or the roaming rate — and neither is the one printed on your plan.
Telvio places the call over the internet instead. Your phone sends audio to our network as data, the same way a browser sends a page request, and our network hands the call to the ordinary telephone system in the destination country. What the person on the other end sees is an ordinary incoming call. They do not need Telvio, they do not need an internet connection, and they can be on a landline in a house that has never had a smartphone in it.
That changes who sets the price. A minute to the United States is $0.07 and a minute to India is $0.24, whichever country your phone is standing in and whichever carrier issued your SIM. The rate for the number you have typed is on screen before you press call, and the full rate sheet is published on this site rather than hidden behind an account.
Nothing about your SIM changes. Your number stays your number, your plan stays your plan, and incoming calls arrive exactly as before. Telvio sits beside the built-in dialler rather than replacing it.
What the app asks for on Android, and what happens if you refuse
The microphone is required. Android asks for it the first time you press call, because a telephone call without a microphone is silent in one direction. Refuse it and the app stays installed and the dial pad still works, but no call will carry your voice. Refuse it twice and Android stops asking — the switch then lives in Settings → Apps → Telvio → Permissions.
Contacts are optional. Granting access lets you call someone by name instead of by number. Refusing costs nothing structural: the dial pad still works, and Telvio keeps its own list of names and numbers on the phone.
Notifications are optional and are used for balance and call-status messages, not for marketing. On Android 13 and later the system asks for them separately from everything else.
There is no account. No email address, no password, no phone number to verify, no Google sign-in. This is unusual enough that people assume it is a step that appears later; it does not. The first screen after install is the dial pad. What the app holds, and for how long, is set out in the privacy policy.
One thing worth setting deliberately: battery optimisation. Android suspends background work aggressively to save power, and a suspended call is a dropped call. Stock Android leaves an active call alone; several manufacturer skins are far more aggressive than stock and do not. If calls end by themselves after a couple of minutes on your device, exempting Telvio from battery optimisation in Settings is the fix, and it is the first thing to try before blaming the network.
Android 7.0 is the floor, and it is deliberately a low one
Telvio requires Android 7.0 Nougat or later — API level 24, released in 2016. In practice that covers effectively every Android phone still in service, including the low-cost hardware that never received an update after it left the shop.
Holding the floor that low is a decision rather than an oversight. The people who most need a cheap way to call abroad are disproportionately not on this year's phone: students, people who have recently moved countries, people sending money home on a schedule. Requiring a recent Android would have made the build simpler and would have excluded a large part of the audience the app exists for.
Google Play does not publish a single download size for the app, and neither will we. Play delivers an app bundle, which means your phone downloads only the code and the resources it actually needs — the screen density it has, the language it is set to, the processor architecture it runs. Two phones installing the same version get two different-sized downloads, so a single number on this page would be wrong for almost everybody.
On Android the connection matters more than the phone
A voice call uses roughly 30 to 40 kilobits per second in each direction. That is a trivial amount of bandwidth — a single photo message moves more data than a ten-minute call — which is why a call can sound perfect on a connection too slow to load a web page.
What a call is sensitive to is not bandwidth but consistency. Audio arrives as a continuous stream of small packets, and a packet that arrives late is as useless as one that never arrives. A connection that loses packets in bursts produces the effect people describe as the call breaking up: whole syllables disappear while the call stays connected. A connection that is merely slow, but steady, sounds fine.
In practice a busy café network is often worse than 4G, and a hotel network shared by three hundred guests is usually worse than both. If a call sounds broken, switching between Wi-Fi and mobile data fixes it more often than anything else you can do from the phone.
The other half of call quality sits on your side of the microphone. A Bluetooth headset that has dropped into hands-free mode degrades audio in both directions and gives no warning that it has — a failure that is far more common on Android than on iOS because of the sheer variety of headsets. Our microphone test runs in Chrome on the phone itself, takes ten seconds and separates a genuine network problem from a headset one before you spend a minute finding out on a real call.
What to type on the keypad
Telvio expects a number in full international form: the country code, then the national number with the destination's trunk prefix removed. The trunk prefix is the leading digit — almost always a zero — that a country requires for domestic long-distance dialling and forbids on an incoming international call. A London number written locally as 020 7946 0018 is dialled internationally as +44 20 7946 0018, with the zero gone.
This one rule accounts for most failed international calls, and it is worth internalising because it is the same rule on every network, not a Telvio quirk. It comes from the ITU numbering plan, which every country's regulator implements.
The convenient case on a phone is a number you already have on screen. A number copied from Chrome, from a message or from an email pastes straight into the dial pad, spaces, brackets and all — Telvio strips the formatting itself. If you are unsure whether a number is a mobile or a landline, and therefore which rate applies, our number validator tells you from the prefix, and the dialling guides cover the format country by country.
What it costs, and when you actually pay
The app is free and every new install arrives with one minute of credit already on the balance. That minute exists so you can test the corridor you actually care about: call quality is per destination, and one minute to the number you will really be calling tells you more than any review of the app.
After that, credit is bought as a one-off in-app purchase — three sizes, the smallest at $1.99 — and spent at the per-country rate. Billing is by the second from the moment the far end answers, with no connection fee, so a 25-second call costs 25 seconds. Services that bill in 60-second blocks charge that same call as a full minute, and charge a 61-second call as two.
Credit does not expire. That is worth stating plainly because it is not the norm: Skype credit went dormant after 180 days of inactivity, and Viber Out credit expires on a similar clock. Money you put on a Telvio balance in March is still there in December.
Purchases go through Google Play billing. No card number and no billing address ever reaches us, which is also why a refund is requested from Google rather than from us, through the same process as any other Play purchase. The pricing page shows what each pack buys in minutes for the corridors people ask about most.
Rates are identical on every platform. A minute costs the same whether it is dialled from this phone, from an iPhone or from a Mac — there is no platform surcharge, and the rate sheet is one document for all of them.
Android tablets
The app installs on Android tablets as well as phones, and on a tablet it is doing something the hardware often cannot do on its own. A tablet sold with a cellular SIM usually carries a data plan rather than a voice plan, so the built-in dialler cannot reach a telephone number even with full signal. Whether a given tablet registers for voice varies by manufacturer and by carrier rather than by Android version.
That makes a tablet a strong candidate for a calling app rather than a weak one: the app supplies a capability the device does not have. The same is true on Apple hardware, where the iPad has no Phone app at all — see Telvio for iPad for what that looks like.
One practical note that applies to any tablet: its microphone sits much further from your mouth than a phone's, and its speakers are loud enough for the microphone to hear them, which produces a faint echo on the other side. Any headset you already own solves both problems.
Bottom line
Telvio for Android is a free app that dials ordinary landline and mobile numbers over Wi-Fi or mobile data rather than over your carrier's network. It requires Android 7.0 or later, which covers effectively every Android phone still in service, and it leaves your SIM, your number and your plan untouched.
It exists for one situation: the number you want to reach is in another country, or you are, and the price your carrier charges for that call is set by a tariff you did not choose. Telvio prices the call by destination instead — $0.07 a minute to the United States, $0.24 to India, from $0.03 at the cheapest — shows you that number before the call connects, and bills by the second afterwards.
There is no account, no subscription and no expiry on credit. The person you call needs nothing at all: no app, no smartphone, no internet. Their phone simply rings.
What the app looks like
The same frames the Play listing shows, in the language the store shows them in.
Telvio for Android at a glance
| Requires | Android 7.0 |
|---|---|
| Runs on | Any phone or tablet on Android 7.0 Nougat or later |
| Current version | 1.1.0 |
| Download size | Varies by device. Play delivers an app bundle, so each phone downloads only the code and resources it needs. |
| Last updated | 2026-08-19 |
| Connection | Wi-Fi, 4G or 5G. A call uses roughly 30–40 kbit/s in each direction. |
| Price | Free to download. Call credit is an in-app purchase from $1.99, billed by the second. |
| Content rating | Everyone |
| The person you call needs | Nothing. The call rings their ordinary phone, landline or mobile. |
From Google Play to a connected call
Three steps, and the free minute means you can test the corridor you care about before spending anything.
- 1
Install and open
Telvio installs from Google Play like any other app. There is no onboarding to click through: the dial pad is the first screen, and the free minute is already on the balance.
- 2
Type the number in full international form
Start with the country code and drop the destination's trunk prefix — the leading zero that belongs to domestic dialling only. Keeping it is the single most common reason an international call fails.
- 3
Press call and grant the microphone
Android asks for the microphone the first time you dial, because a call without it would be silent in one direction. The rate for the number is on screen before the call connects.
Sources
- International Calls — Telvio on Google Play opens in a new tab — Google. Version, minimum Android version, content rating and update date.
- Skype is retiring in May 2025: what you need to know opens in a new tab — Microsoft. Skype was retired on 5 May 2025. Existing credit moved into Microsoft Teams and can still be spent, but no new credit can be bought — which is why the table calls it partial.
- Set up Google Voice opens in a new tab — Google. The setup requirements behind the Google Voice row, including the US number a personal account needs.
- Recommendation E.164: the international public telecommunication numbering plan opens in a new tab — ITU. The numbering rules behind country codes, trunk prefixes and the number format the app expects.
Platform requirements are quoted from the documentation that owns them rather than from a summary. The Play figures were last verified on 20 August 2026; where a competing service has changed recently — Skype most of all — the primary source is the one that says so.
Android questions
Which Android versions can run Telvio?
Android 7.0 Nougat or later — API level 24, released in 2016. In practice that covers effectively every Android phone and tablet still in service, including low-cost hardware that never received an update.
Does Telvio replace my phone's dialler or change my number?
No. It sits beside the built-in Phone app. Your SIM, your number and your plan are untouched, incoming calls arrive exactly as before, and nothing about your mobile account changes.
Does the person I call need the app?
No. Telvio calls the ordinary telephone network, so the call arrives as a normal incoming call on a normal phone. The person answering does not need Telvio, a smartphone, or an internet connection — a landline in a house with no computer in it works exactly the same.
How big is the download?
It varies by device. Google Play delivers an app bundle, so each phone downloads only the code and resources it needs for its screen density, language and processor. Two phones installing the same version get two different-sized downloads.
Why do my calls end after a couple of minutes?
Almost always battery optimisation. Android suspends background work aggressively, and some manufacturer skins are far more aggressive than stock Android, where an active call is normally left alone. Exempting Telvio from battery optimisation in Settings fixes it on those devices. Try that before blaming the network.
How much mobile data does a call use?
Roughly 30 to 40 kilobits per second in each direction, which works out at a few megabytes for a long call — less than a single photo sent over a messaging app. The connection's steadiness matters far more than its speed: a slow but consistent link sounds better than a fast one that loses packets in bursts.
Is there a subscription?
No. Call credit is bought as one-off in-app purchases starting at $1.99, spent at the per-country rate, and it does not expire. There is no monthly fee and nothing renews. Purchases go through Google Play billing, so no card details reach us.
Does it work on an Android tablet?
Yes, and on a tablet it often supplies a capability the hardware lacks: a tablet sold with a cellular SIM usually carries a data plan rather than a voice plan, so the built-in dialler cannot reach a telephone number. A headset is worth using, because a tablet's microphone sits far from your mouth and its speakers are loud enough to echo.
Your first minute is already on the balance
Install, dial the number you actually care about, and hear the line before you spend anything.
