Comparison

World Voicemail vs lodestar

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

World Voicemail

This app transforms your voicemail experience by offering visual transcripts and playback directly from your lock screen. It includes advanced spam blocking for both calls and voicemails, along with features like forwarding to email and search functionality.

Highlights
  • Visual voicemail transcripts
  • Lock screen playback/reading
  • Spam voicemail blocking
  • Spam call blocking
  • Voicemail forwarding to email
  • Searchable voicemails
  • Audio playback speed control
Features
Read full description

Enjoy a 1-week free trial. Cancel anytime. World Voicemail revolutionizes your voicemail experience, making it effortless to retrieve and respond to voicemails. IMPORTANT: To use World Voicemail, your mobile phone service provider must support 'Conditional Call Diversion'. To test whether your provider supports this feature, please call **004*+16502624537*11#. After using this test number, please call this number to cancel: ##004*11#. KEY FEATURES: READ YOUR VOICEMAIL VISUALLY You can read automatic transcripts of your voicemail. Want to listen to them? That's easy; just press play. LISTEN TO OR READ YOUR VOICEMAIL ON THE LOCK SCREEN That's right - you don't even need to enter the App to see your latest voicemail. BLOCK SPAM VOICEMAILS Cut through the noise and get rid of spam voicemails. Move a voicemail to the new Spam folder or mark a caller as a spammer. Artificial intelligence also automatically detects and informs you of Suspected Spam. BLOCK SPAM CALLS Get fewer calls from spam callers by adding numbers to the in-app Spammers list, and their next call will instantly go to voicemail or get blocked. If you have a voicemail marked Suspected Spam from a number, their next incoming call will also display as Suspected Spam. NATIVE SUPPORT FOR DARK MODE We've crafted a beautiful dark mode experience that's easy on the eyes. ACCESS YOUR VOICEMAILS IN ANY ORDER Navigating your voicemails is now as easy as a scroll and tap. View voicemails in threads, organised by contact. AUDIO PLAYBACK SPEED CONTROL Save time or listen carefully to your voicemails with 0.8x, 1x, 1.5x, or 2x speed controls. VOICEMAIL FORWARDING TO EMAIL Add up to two email addresses to receive your voicemails right in your inbox. Why two email addresses? So you can boost your responsiveness by also sending voicemails to your assistant or team to respond on your behalf! Don't worry; you can filter out calls from personal contacts. SEARCH YOUR VOICEMAILS BY NAME OR KEYWORD With our built-in automatic transcription service, World Voicemail makes your voicemails effortlessly searchable. EASY PERSONALIZED GREETING SETUP World Voicemail makes it easy for you to record your personalized greeting. Change it every season, or if you're away on holiday. EASY MANAGEMENT Managing your voicemails has never been easier. Call back contacts, share your voicemails or delete them to save space. UNLOCK WITH BIOMETRICS Protect voicemails on your phone with a passcode and biometrics - Face ID and Touch ID. VOICEMAILS ON YOUR LOCK SCREEN Read or listen to voicemails right from your lock screen or notification centre. MULTI-LINGUAL SUPPORT Enjoy World Voicemail in Afrikaans, Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai and Vietnamese. UNDER THE HOOD To use World Voicemail as your primary voicemail service, you simply need to divert your voicemails to our App. We'll show you how. This is safe and reversible. A subscription is required to use the World Voicemail. You can sign up to one or twelve-month subscriptions. ABOUT SUBSCRIPTIONS The duration and price of each subscription are visible on the storefront, updated during the time of purchase. Payment will be charged to iTunes Account at confirmation of purchase. Subscriptions automatically renew unless auto-renew is turned off at least 24-hours before the end of the current period. Subscriptions may be managed by the user and auto-renewal may be turned off by going to the user's iTunes Account Settings after purchase. Any unused portion of a free trial period is forfeited as soon as a subscription is purchased. Privacy Policy: https://norwoodsystems.com/privacy-policy/ Terms of Use: https://norwoodsystems.com/terms-and-conditions/

About

lodestar

Features
Read full description

lodestar is the remote for the media stack you already run, connected straight from your iPhone to your own servers. Radarr and Sonarr. Prowlarr and Bazarr. Overseerr and Jellyseerr. Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, and Tautulli. NZBGet, SABnzbd, qBittorrent, Transmission, and Deluge. LazyLibrarian and Audiobookshelf for books. One native app for all of it. Deep, not shallow. Each service gets its own screens for browsing and control, not a status widget. Browse and edit your Radarr and Sonarr libraries, add movies and series with root folder, quality profile, and tags, run interactive release searches and push the exact release you want to your download client, manage queues with blocklisting, and check history, missing, and upcoming. Download clients get real control too: reorder and prioritize queues, pause and resume globally or per item, set speed limits, and dig into per-torrent trackers, peers, and file priorities. Torrents included. qBittorrent, Transmission, and Deluge are first-class modules alongside usenet, not afterthoughts. Requests, subtitles, and indexers. Approve what your household asks for through Overseerr or Jellyseerr. Chase down missing subtitles in Bazarr. See which indexer is failing in Prowlarr, which is usually the real answer to "why did nothing download". Your media server too. See who is watching what right now on Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby, stop a stream, and read the viewing history and stats Tautulli keeps. It tells you what is stuck. One screen collects every failed grab, blocked import, stalled download, and health warning across the whole stack, with the fix one tap away. One calendar for everything. Upcoming movies and episodes from every Radarr and Sonarr instance, merged into month and agenda views. Built for real setups. Unlimited profiles for multi-instance stacks (4K and 1080p Radarr side by side), instant profile switching, LAN and WAN addresses with automatic fallback, custom headers, and self-signed certificate support. The connection wizard validates live and tells you exactly why a connection failed. Native and fast. Built in SwiftUI for iPhone and iPad, iOS 17 and up, so it runs on the devices newer apps have already dropped. Full dark mode, haptics, designed empty states, and home screen widgets. No web views pretending to be an app. Your servers stay yours. On your own network, lodestar talks directly from your iPhone to your servers: no account, and nothing sent to us. Optional remote access adds a lodestar account and a relay we run, so the app can reach your servers from anywhere through an agent you install at home. The relay carries traffic it cannot read. API keys live in the iOS Keychain and go only to your servers, or sealed to your own agent when remote access is on. Three ways to use it. The agent and its web app on your own network are free. The iOS app's free tier is one profile with up to two services, direct connections, full functionality. lodestar lifetime, one payment, unlocks the app for good, unlimited profiles and services, and includes thirty days of remote access. lodestar monthly is remote access: reach your servers from anywhere through our relay and the web app, cancel any time in Settings. lodestar is a remote control for servers you already operate. It downloads nothing itself, requires media server software running on your own hardware, and is for content you have the right to. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Privacy Policy: https://lodestar.i8l.tech/privacy Support: https://lodestar.i8l.tech/support

Screenshots

World Voicemail4 screens
lodestar4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is update cadence: lodestar at every 5 days against World Voicemail's every 2 months. World Voicemail's advantage is iOS requirement (14 vs 17.0). On price, ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. World Voicemail sells 4 in-app purchases, starting at $5.99 per month and lodestar sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $2.99 per month. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

World Voicemail ships an update every 2 months, lodestar every 5 days. The most recent releases landed on October 27, 2026 and October 18, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard2 real differences · 8 level
World Voicemail versus lodestar: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterWorld Voicemaillodestar
PriceFreeFree
Rating4.2 (1.6K ratings) — better—
Positive reviews33.6% of reviews—
Number of ratings1.6K — better—
Update frequencyEvery 2 monthsEvery 5 days — better
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesYesYes
MonetizationFree with in-app purchases—
DevicesiPhone, iPad, iPod — betteriPhone, iPad
Requires iOS14 — better17.0
Further details — not scored
Size148 MB15 MB
Age rating17+4+
DeveloperNorwood Systems (Aust) Pty LtdJonathan Poeder

Bugs and requests

World Voicemail

Reported bugs

3 issues
  • Voicemail messages not recording properly
  • App crashing or not functioning as expected
  • Subscription issues and inability to cancel

Requested features

3 requests
  • Ability to sort and manage voicemails
  • Improved transcription accuracy
  • Option to disable automatic subscription

lodestar

Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.

In-app purchases

4 purchases

World Voicemail

Subscriptions4
  • Subscribe for a month$5.991 Month
  • 3-month subscription$12.993 Months
  • Best deal! Annual subscription7 Days trial$45.991 Year
Show 1 more
  • Best deal! Annual subscription$45.991 Year
2 purchases

lodestar

Subscriptions1
  • lodestar monthly7 Days trial$2.991 Month
One-time1
  • lodestar lifetime$19.99

Questions

Is World Voicemail free?
World Voicemail is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Is lodestar free?
lodestar is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Do World Voicemail or lodestar have ads?
Neither World Voicemail nor lodestar shows ads.
Which is updated more often, World Voicemail or lodestar?
World Voicemail ships an update every 2 months, and lodestar every 5 days. Most recently, World Voicemail was updated on October 27, 2026 and lodestar on October 18, 2026.

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