[darkhelmet]

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.

[antonymoose]

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.

[SoftTalker]

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

[godelski]

  >  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...

[drysart]

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.

[jkubicek]

> 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.

[godelski]

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)

[crooked-v]

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.

[cptskippy]

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