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Comment by AGorilla | Hacker News Reader

Mixing the voicemails in with the entire call history is a terrible idea for a few reasons: 1. If you've made/received enough phone calls to fill the page before checking your voicemails, you have to scroll or filter to find the new voicemail. 2. If you're trying to find an old voicemail, you have to filter or MEGA scroll to find it. 3. Voicemail is virtually hidden from new users. I can imagine many people tapping the icon with the little red 1 and then not having any idea what to do.

Counting voicemails and missed calls separately is a little annoying, but this is definitely not the way to solve the problem. If this were ever implemented I would throw my phone in the garbage.

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I kind of agree but to the article's credit it does filter for voicemail.

To me it seems one option would be to remove the recent dot after viewing a voicemail.

That being said I think these two systems are independent of each other, ie there's nothing to link the voicemail to a recent call (seems the recent call is a "client" side action as opposed to the voicemail which is "server" side action). Without some sort of call id they can't really link the two to remove the dot on the recents when cleared from voicemail.

Actually the more I think about it the more I believe this is likely the case, I don't think recent calls are linked to voicemail. Anyone know?

That wouldn't matter. After a voicemail is received, compare its attributes to recently missed calls. If there was a missed call from the same number that left the voicemail, chances are good the recent highlight can be removed.

"chances are good" is a slippery slope.

You could make this work if you took into account the time the call and voice mail were received. You could even treat them as a "conversation" kind of how gmail does.

The thing that strikes me as odd, is that Apple doesn't do this. This problem and work-around were obvious to me the first time I got a voicemail. And Apple doesn't often make thoughtless mistakes like that.

It makes me wonder if AT&Ts voice mail system just isn't giving them enough information to match the records reliably.

(E.g. If the voice mail record doesn't distinguish between the origination number and the callback number, trying to match messages to missed calls would be inconsistent.)

It wouldn't have to be much; just enough margin for error to make the system a little unreliable. Because I can definitely see Apple opting for 'weird, but consistent' over 'inconsistent', even if it is only rarely inconsistent.

Hmm... compromise perhaps: Voicemail page stays the same, loses an indication of new voicemails, Call log keeps indication of new calls and ability to play voicemail associated with a call. No change to coloring of missed calls.

* Point 1 is mitigated because missed calls show up in red. * Point 2 is mitigated because voicemail page remains. * Point 3 is ignored because it's probably not a huge concern.

That would be nice except aren't there ways to leave voicemails directly? In that case you would have a voicemail but no missed call. It's a less-than-important edge case, I admit.

Like when your phone is off or not in a cell service area.

This was my reaction (though not as strong as throwing away my phone ;)

He could have stopped with the part about "don't use redundant dots" and I would've been all for it. The number is misleading, as is the annoyance of having to remove the indicator from Voicemail and Recent, but I don't think the answer is getting rid of one of them...

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