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Comment by conductr | Hacker News Reader

If I could just block the numbers, or auto send to voicemail, that my phone already flags as Spam/Telemarketing this wouldn’t be so frustrating for me. I do need my phone to ring for unknowns/outside my contacts numbers, so the blocking ability I need isn’t available (on iOS anyway.) I am left manually doing this when something rings if it is flagged, I will ignore it and if it’s unknown and not flagged I will answer it. It’s not perfect but could easily cut more than half of my current interruptions.

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For what it's worth, upcoming iOS 26 has a new screening feature. The idea is that calls from numbers you don't have a connection with will be asked to briefly identify themselves and why they're calling. It'll show you this text and give you the choice to block/send-to-voicemail/ignore/accept.

The problem I have with my iPhone is not callers, thankfully, it’s random iMessage from emails spamming me constantly, as many as 5 per day. The “filter unknown senders” option does not appear to work at all for these scammers.

I filter unknown messages but the iMessage view constantly switches back to “All Messages” instead of staying on “Known Senders”

  >  upcoming iOS 26 has a new screening feature

I had this on my old Pixel. The result was that people generally hung up and didn't leave a message. Apple is a little bit better with marketing and hopefully won't make the same dumb move of making it a "pro only feature" so maybe it'll be different this time around...

I've been running the iOS 26 beta for a while and really the only problem people have had with it is that it's very clear the message the caller gets is pre-recorded, and without fail everyone who's interacted with it was expecting a beep, like an answering machine, before responding to it; but it doesn't actually beep, it just asks the caller to describe who they are and why they're calling.

So every screening popup I got had amusing text like "Is it going to beep? Hello?"

When it becomes commonplace, I expect the real problem with it will be that spam callers will recognize it and just starting giving false information to it to try to trick the party into accepting the call.

> The result was that people generally hung up and didn't leave a message.

This sounds perfect to me. Not only do I not have to talk to spammers, I don't even need to listen to their messages.

Spammers leave a message because they hear something and their bot starts talking. So it is worse than if I just don't answer.

But legit people, they just hang up. That's also a worse situation than not answering because in that case they'd have left a message. (this is hit or miss. Sometimes they leave a message. But 0 times have they actually responded to the screening)

There's also a "send unsaved numbers to voicemail" option if you don't like the call screening, and a separate toggle that puts calls/voicemails from unknown numbers on a separate list from the main one.

So iOS will automatically confirm your number for spammers? That's nice...

I use call screening with Google Fi. I recently added my number to the FCC block list, and they made some recent changes, so it's gotten a lot better.

I did ask if I could just send all calls not in my contact list to get screened, and that idea seemed to "blow their mind," though.

You mean the donotcall.gov database? What changes have they made?

When they are screening a call, if I push the button to answer the call, the call comes to me immediately.

They used to play back a 10 to 20 second "polite" message that just annoyed everybody.

I don't follow what you mean. You have a call screening program or something?

But I'm not sure what that has to do with the Do Not Call database.

I think "call screening with Google Fi" is some kind of service/feature, which they have enabled.

Yeah. I'm not sure why Spam Risk rings because it almost certainly is spam. But I do get doctor offices, service people related to something I'm dealing with at the moment, emergencies related to family members, etc. that are legit. I suspect the permanently do not disturb faction are mostly in a different life stage than many of us.

I'd probably add that the area code + exchange calls from an area code that you don't actually live in are spam as well though don't see those as much as I once did.

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