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Comment by codazoda | Hacker News Reader

> No it’s pretty much idiocy to basically throw away voice calls because you get a usually obvious junk call now and then.

Seems the other way to me and I would guess you’ve never tried it for any length of time. I get 4x as many junk calls as I get legit calls. If I don’t recognize your number, I send you to VM. My parents are elderly but they leave a message or send a text if I don’t answer. I add my doctors offices, city dispatcher, and similar numbers to my phone as soon as I learn them. It’s rarely a problem to hear a message and call back a few minutes later (except when they also don’t answer, in which case I leave a message and now have their number in my phone). Even works for large multi-location offices, who often show the same number no matter which is calling. My (adult) kids have been involved in emergencies and I see “City Dispatch” come up and I answer.

It’s just not a problem.

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> If I don’t recognize your number, I send you to VM.

This is about silently rejecting all calls from non-contacts. You don't even know somebody tried to call, and any voicemail notification is easily lost among other e-mail and SMS and app notifications.

You're totally excluding your ability to respond to anything urgent unless you happen to check your voicemail notification at that very moment.

I'm glad your doctor calls all come from the same number -- mine don't at all. Nor do calls from delivery people asking where to safely leave a package, and so forth.

I'm glad it's not a problem for you -- I thought it wasn't a problem for me until it had negative consequences for me. So it's just to warn people, you know?

If you can’t figure out how to make your voicemail notification noticeable, why would you be able to notice a phone call better?

Because my phone rings and apparently unlike other people on this thread it’s usually a legit call and I can just let it drop to voicemail if it’s one of the relatively few obviously junk calls I get.

>You don't even know somebody tried to call

it's not. that's not how the iOS feature works. you still see it as a missed call, there's a notification saying it was rejected. it just doesn't ring.

The fact they think this shows they have no idea what they’re talking about.

This problem was solved when apple introduced ignore unknown callers.

They could improve on it slightly by allowing iOS apps access to breakthrough if they can prove its from an app somehow (like Uber or doordash), but really even that is an optimization not really needed.

For the phantom “what about my kid who’s phone is destroyed and is calling me from a strangers phone with seconds to live” you’d get the voicemail and multiple calls anyway.

That said, in recent years I’ve noticed a precipitous drop of these kinds of spam calls, so it may no longer be that big of an issue.

> For the phantom “what about my kid who’s phone is destroyed and is calling me from a strangers phone with seconds to live” you’d get the voicemail and multiple calls anyway.

No need to exaggerate -- this is about restaurants and doctors and deliveries, things that happen routinely -- not hostage situations you've pulled from the movies.

So no, you don't get multiple calls, and the voicemail notification is easily lost among 10 other notifications from the past half-hour. That's the whole point.

No, the problem was not solved by Apple.

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