I wonder if in the future people will wonder why they are called phone companies? Maybe this is all part if their plan to move us to paid SMS or some other thing, but it seems more like an oops.
But it's still a nice dream.
There was a single throw away line in WWDC that suggested they may have finally added this (depending on what they mean by “unknown” caller).
All I want is a contact based whitelist with an API endpoint that allows calls for a small time window (for doordash and Uber to use).
This would solve 99% of the spam issue. All other calls can go straight to voicemail. Allow an option for repeated calls to get through if you must.
Apple’s current call kit api only allows blacklists which work poorly and are a lot less elegant.
Then maybe they ought not to do that?
Services that cared could change behavior to call from a single number.
I couldn’t figure out an obvious way around the api restriction, but if you want to try there was a github project called open call block which was a decent starting point.
W/G/B is still the best policy: white/grey/black.
I could be wrong, but I believe a "known caller" is someone whose number appears in your Contacts, or a number that has recently shown up in Mail or Messages.
You can also configure Do Not Disturb mode to allow calls to come in from your contacts or from your favorites.
For a free alternative, you could route all your calls through Google Voice. You can transfer your current # to GV and then forward your GV calls to your new number that you don't have to even know beyond configuring call forwarding. GV has spam filtering, call screening, and lots of other useful features. Dunno how/if it would mess up your texting app though.
I used GV for a long time, but abandoned it once I learned Google was silently dropping group chat messages (without telling the sender) because they let their gizmo5 purchase languish with no dev work for years and never implemented MMS (this was a couple of years ago). Google had such a head start with GV, but did nothing with it and let iMessage catch up and pass them.
If there's something that I find completely puzzling about Google it's their disaster around messaging strategy.
It's also frustrating to me that all of these mediocre blacklisting applications (robokiller, hiya, nomorobo) only exist as hacks because neither iOS or Android allowed the obvious contact whitelist ability. Though it sounds like in iOS13 this may finally be changing.
I've tested out the "silence unknown callers" feature in the iOS 13 beta and it works very much in a similar way. "Unknown callers" seems to be any call that isn't in your recent calls or in your contacts.
When I made MyHumans (just launched in the last month), I knew there was a risk of something like this appearing in iOS 13, but I'll be adding some more features.
Do you do something special?
I know people who are already there.
When that notion grows, even slightly, it will be the instant death of PSTN (public switched telephone networks), due to negative network effects.
A huge question will be the fight over standards to replace this, and what capabilities (to communicating parties, initiator, receivers, carriers, vendors, third parties, criminals, law enforcement, intelligence agencies) are and are not afforded, intentionally or otherwise.
Similarly, I keep wondering if the word "phone" might annex the word "computer" entirely. If most people call their day-to-day pocket computer a "phone", what's to stop people calling every computer a non-pocket phone?
Some classic "futurism" ads of AT&T from back in the monopoly era (50s/60s) always had that interesting assumption that phones would be everywhere and do everything. We seem to have brought that future about ironically enough, just that the definition of "phone" is changing so drastically, and also that there are a lot fewer AT&T logos on everything.
The telephone network just seems like some vestigial leftover only used by pollsters to scare us with 80-year-olds' candidate picks in midterm elections.