I’ve been looking for an app that will let me instantly record both sides of a cellphone conversation on the fly when I press a button. This would be very useful to take audio notes in a situation where a pen and paper aren’t handy. It seems to me that such an app would have universal appeal. It would be trivial to bake this capability right into the phone.
There are apps that claim to do this, or something close to it. But the ones I looked at seem to be dependent upon some magical combination of the app + hardware + service provider + phase of the moon if they are to work. The most frequent complaint is that only the local conversation is recorded while the distant end is not.
The conspiracy theorist in me leads me to think that this is an assault on my rights by “Big Cellphone”. But it is more likely it has to do with ambiguity of laws regarding the recording of phone conversations and that phone vendors don’t want to get involved in privacy kerfuffles.