Does anyone here have a relatively recent iPhone, from the last year or two? Doesn’t have to be the super recent one that just came out a few weeks ago, but something with spam call screening and spam text filtering? How well does it work?
I’m slowly trying to de-Google my life (for unrelated reasons… mostly just tired of their Gemini spam), and one of the big holdouts is my Android phone. I currently have a Google Pixel phone, and its call and text spam blocking are extremely good. I get maybe 2-3 texts a year that slip through, and no phone calls that I can remember. The robot screener says something like “Hello, this is the Google voice assistant. Before I connect you, can I ask what you’re calling about?” That gets 99% of spammers to hang up, and of the remaining few who actually bother to leave a message, I can just one-click block them after reading the transcript.
A few years back (iPhone 14), I tried an iPhone for a few months. I don’t think Apple had added their spam blocking yet. It was SO bad that I would get several calls a week and dozens of texts. I eventually tried to add third-party apps like RoboKiller and some text blockers, but they didn’t work anywhere near as effectively as the Pixel’s built-in ones. After a few months, the problem remained so bad that I had to switch back to Android just from the spam.
Is it any better these days?
I think that, and Google Maps/Calendar (both of which are available on iOS) are my last main Google holdouts…
(The spam calls and texts I get are almost entirely political, which are not subject to many of the federal anti-spam rules. The Pixel does a great job of filtering them out. The third-party iOS apps did not.)
I get 2-5 calls a day that are marked as “Likely Spam” so I don’t answer them. Others are marked as “Robocaller” or something like that. And then others are just “unknown number”, which are also almost always spam. I’d say probably 80% or more of the spam calls are marked as such.
For texts it’s not as good - I still get probably 1-2 a day, mainly political ones (damn you Gavin Newsom). I get maybe 1-2 a week non-political spam texts (typically obvious UPS scams or crypto-wallet scams or whatever). I have no idea how many they block, however…
Both can. The carrier can apply blocks to numbers they know to be spam.
But many will slip through that and reach your phone. That’s where the phone’s own blocking (or that of a third-party app) come into play.
Political calls in particular are a nightmare both because they are classified slightly different from regular spam, and because you can get volunteers to sit in a room and push buttons to initiate texts & calls from special political spam software. Because a real person pushed a button to initiate the call, it’s not considered automated anymore and skirts even the feeble regulations…
With my iPhone 12 Pro I can set so it will ring only for numbers in my contacts listing and reject unknowns’ rings. They can leave a voicemail but very few ever do and those I just block and delete.
Giving a new number to only your friends won’t do much. The spam callers generate numbers by the millions and call every potential combination.
iPhone 15 Pro
I had it set to silence all unknown calls and send them to voicemail and it pretty much blocked all spam calls but I turned that off cause it blocked some actual real calls from doctors and just have it set to silence all calls Verizon recognizes as spam. I still get political texts, even though I always tell it to block the number.