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Comment by spicymaki | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of useless personal anecdotes in this blog post, but one resonates with me strongly: Apple needs to better handle spam calls. In fact the entire mechanism dealing with how we make phone calls (authenticating callers) is ripe for disruption.

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A big selling point of a phone to me is a built in blacklist feature. Problem is I only get that after the fact, or if I hunt for it while physically shopping. They don't usually bulletpoint it as a selling point, but it should be a standard feature.

I don't own an iPhone, but I assume you have the same trouble I do with spam texts/calls and no real decent blacklisting solution (most apps just don't work and I'm not going to throw money after money to find the one that does work in that pile of shovelware they call the play store.

Not sure if it works on IPhone but on android I've had very good luck / experience with "Truecaller: Caller ID, SMS spam blocking & Dialer". It doesn't catch them all, but it did decrease the amount of spam call / text I get within a month from 23 to 1. So that is nice.

iOS supports seamless call blocking via inexpensive 3rd party apps like Hiya. Hiya works great, calls that are suspect get labeled and calls that are verified fraud or marketing are never seen but available in call history. This been around since iOS 10 maybe longer.

This does not solve the fundamental issue, which is that it is trivial to spoof caller id. I get random numbers every day from scammers. We need a system where callers can certify who the callers are reliably.

Which anecdotes do you find useless?

The author's iPhone 6+ does not age well with apps consuming significant power. That anecdote is not useful, because that is a particular issue with the author's phone and not general enough to be useful. If you abuse your phone battery, it will not maintain capacity. My 6 plus's battery is at 89% capacity after 3+ years.

The author complains about Apple technical support, but brings up a anecdote about a laptop (I thought this was about a phone). Can you bring a Samsung phone to a Samsung store to get it repaired? I remember needing to mail my Samsung phone in for warranty repair and the screen coming back with a diagonal slice where they cut the packaging open. That sucked, but I am not going to blame all of Samsung for that (it was probably an unfortunate mistake) or blame the Android ecosystem.

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