For my use, 99% of the time i just leave my iPhone set to silently reject all calls from unknown numbers, and that works for me.
it's pretty rare that there's somebody not already in my contacts that i actually want to be able to call me. they can go to voicemail, and i'll deal with it later.
Except for when a restaurant is calling you to let you know that your table is ready.
Or your doctor's office is calling to let you know they suddenly have an opening this afternoon.
Or your Uber driver is calling to let you know you left something valuable in their car, right after they've dropped you off at the airport.
And so forth. I've learned from hard experience that silencing all calls from non-contacts bites you in the ass. There are legitimate calls that benefit you now, where going to voicemail defeats the purpose.
To each their own, and everyone’s life has different complexities, but a decade of never answering a number I don’t know has yet to be a problem. A few times a year I’ll get a message from the doctor on my answering machine. That’s about it.
Generally they prey on people who cannot override their fear of missing out. It’s the “you may have already won!” trick in a different format.
Yeah. I’m willing to bet that the casual “so what if they can’t reach me” crowd don’t have elderly parents, kids, spouses, don’t put themselves in group trip situations where you don’t want to put everyone’s number in your permanent contacts, etc. No it’s pretty much idiocy to basically throw away voice calls because you get a usually obvious junk call now and then.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
> I’m willing to bet that the casual “so what if they can’t reach me” crowd don’t have[...]
You'd be making a bad bet.
Besides, who is taking that stance? I don't answer my phone if the caller isn't in my phone book, but that doesn't mean legitimate unknown callers can't reach me! They leave a voice mail, and I'm listening to it immediately after they're done.
Because some things are urgent and I may not notice a straight to voicemail for a long time. I understand if junk calls are so frequent that some people are basically forced to ignore non-contact phone calls but it seems sub-optimal for the couple times a week situation which is my case.
> Because some things are urgent and I may not notice a straight to voicemail for a long time.
How so? My phone notifies me that the original call came in, and also notifies me that a voicemail was left. If I'm in a situation where I wouldn't notice a voicemail was left, I wouldn't notice the call in the first place anyway.
By default, calls ring or vibrate constantly so that you don't ignore them. Because they're intended for synchronous communication.
Notifications (including voicemails) are just a short ping, jumbled in with all your other notifications. Because they're intended for async communication.
So no, by design, your phone is meant for you to notice somebody calling more than a voicemail being left.
The latest iOS instantly transcribes voicemail. I find it handy to pick up the calll midway through. Just to be clear, I’ve used it exactly once so far. We’ll see how that goes.
The only situation you describe that actually would fit the “unknown callers” is the group trips.
Family are in my contacts, problem solved.
As for group trips, turn it off for that day(s) and turn it back on. Those, for most people, I would think would be pretty uncommon, and manually switching it off and back on is a much better solution than always having to deal with robo calls.
And I’m sure I would rarely remember and it’s not a wildly rare scenario for me. I admit I’m not deluged with junk but I’m not willing to roll over and make my phone significantly less useful because of some spammers.
My doctor's office is in my phone book, so that's covered.
For things like restaurants, I know that I'll be receiving a call from an unknown number and will just answer it.
For unexpected things, like Uber, they'll leave a message on my voice mail. I'll be notified of that as soon as they're done and will check it immediately.
That all works for me. It's a shame that I have to do all of that rather than just answer the phone, but there's no other option that I can see.
The feature they’re referring to , the phone won’t even ring and send the caller straight to voicemail. You won’t know you got the call unless you happen to be looking at the screen.
That's on your notification settings though. You can make Voicemails have a higher notification priority if you want. If you just turn on reject unknown calls and keep up everything else normally, you may have issues, but if you adjust some and do things like making voicemails more obvious and add more contacts to your phone, it works ok.
For sensitive times where I know I'm expecting a doctor/contractor to call, I'll just turn it off and set a reminder for later on to enable it again.
I would do that, but my doctors office seems to have at least 100 phone lines, and the number that shows up on the caller is basically random after the first 4 digits.
Quite often you'll find that the doctors office is part of a larger system for an entire medical center. Your call can get routed out any open physical line. These days fully VOIP systems will mask the number as the primary, but some systems still have physical connectivity to the phone companny.
Oh I wish. I’m in Optimum (Former Suddenlink) territory.
It’s only in the past year I was able to upgrade from 300mbps to gigabit, and it ain’t fiber. Also obvious that the local techs have no clue what they’re doing since the link goes down several times a night briefly, always at exactly 15 minutes after the hour. It’s obvious there’s a switch or something that they’re just rebooting every night.
Google Fi is an MVNO. They give you a sim, service is provided via T-Mobile mostly. (It used to have Android required special roaming on Sprint, but T-Mobile absorbed Sprint, so that's moot)
Ahh.c that explains it. I’ve been on sprint forever, on a long grandfathered unlimited plan. I was only actually swapped to a T-Mobile sim about 6 months ago.
I live in Aus. Spam calls use unredacted numbers. Several places, including the police, do redact their number.
I have no idea why they don’t use a single egress number so I know who’s calling, but here we are.
Just imagine reporting to the police that a stalker is calling you from an unknown number, only to have the police call you on an unknown number.
The really funny thing is, that these calls often have called ID from within Australian network, but the caller is obviously from outside the australian network.
Seriously, just ban anyone pretending to be another number unless the telco itself has set it up. The phone is essentially useless to me these days.
I set up an IVR that requires (non-white listed) callers to press a number to ring through. My spam calls went from several most days to less than one a year. I suppose I also miss out on automated appointment reminders, but whatever.
I don't like rejecting calls. I prefer they go to voice mail/transcription, so I set my main system ringtone to a few seconds of silence, and then a custom ringtone for everyone in my contact list (plus a few additional ringtones for family and close friends).
Bonus, if I happen to notice the phone screen light up with an unknown number and I know I'm waiting for a service station to call, I can always try my luck that it is actually legit.
Do you have family? Because I've heard horror stories of people who did this, and then no one could contact them when a family member was seriously hurt.
I do this and I have family. If somebody leaves a voicemail I check it right away.
About 6 months ago I started getting 10-30 calls per day so I really have no other option. Most of them are Medicare scammers (I'm not even old enough to qualify). I cannot fathom how:
1. The FCC/telcos have managed to allow anyone to spoof any number they like with no oversight and no (effective) abuse reporting system. This has been going on for years with absolutely no improvement.
2. Medicare is apparently so easy to scam out of money that all they need is my name and birthday to get money out of the system on my behalf. When I've answered and played along by giving them fake information, they always hang up as soon as they have these 2 pieces of info.
it's pretty rare that there's somebody not already in my contacts that i actually want to be able to call me. they can go to voicemail, and i'll deal with it later.