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Comment by snielson | Hacker News Reader

Assistive access mode for an iPhone is fantastic for the elderly. It's the only way my 85-year-old father can even use a phone. One of the best features is that it can be set to allow incoming calls only from people in his contacts. It's such a lifesaver.

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What if it's police or the hospital trying to call?

I suppose it'd be "simple" for the device to answer the call and then prompt for a password before ringing for the user, but then the random caller needs to know the password. But then again, it could be as simple as "This is Siri, please say the name of the person you're trying to reach.", and since spammers usually don't have a name associated with the number they just randomly dialled, they'll be stumped.

I strongly suspect the people who throw all these roadblocks if an unknown number calls them don’t have kids, elderly relatives, various medical visits, etc. personally I’m not going to make myself hard to reach because of the cost of a spam call now and then.

If it works for you fine. But understand that different people have different needs.

I used to feel the same, but nowadays, I have very few normal calls, mostly from close relatives only, but a dozen of spam calls a week. And that used not to be the case before 2024. I know robocalls are/were a terrible affliction in the US for like the last 10 years, but they were very few of these in Hungary. I wish I'd know what caused this change..

It's hard to say why people's experiences differ so much in the US I get maybe 3 a week or so. I would probably be more aggressive about adding businesses and people to my contact list if I were more aggressive about blocking possible SPAM. For me, the SPAM is one of life's lesser annoyances but I should probably check out some of the prevent features Apple has built into iOS.

iOS 26 can sort-of do what you suggest in your second paragraph. The device answers the call, asks who is calling and the purpose of the call, then (if the caller doesn’t hang up) presents the answers textually in the call-answering UI to allow you to decide whether to answer or not.

At the moment, most spam callers just hang up so I never even get to the choice to answer, although I do wonder if that’ll change if the feature gets popular.

> What if it's police or the hospital trying to call?

They leave a message and you call them back if it's actually important? Do you really answer every call you get?

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