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Spam calls in Canada are out of control — this new iPhone feature stops them
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https://mobilesyrup.com/2025/09/23/spam-calls-canada-stop-them-new-iphone-feature/
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When it was introduced to Android years ago, I regained a lot of my sanity. Prior to it, I was seriously considering just disabling the phone function and sending everything to rot in voicemail. I can’t remember the last time an actual spam call got through the invisible screening process.
having voicemail also confirms there’s a human which gets you thrown back on the lists.
As does screening or answering. There’s no way around that unless you just don’t plan to ever use your phone as a phone.
Can’t wait to hear about this “new to all cell phones” feature from iPhone people.
I’ve not heard of another cell phone that answers and says “give me the reason you’re calling or I’m gonna hang up”
That’s literally what Google’s call screening feature has done on Android for years. The fact that you (and many people) have never heard of it, is a different problem (and is classic Google, in some ways).
I’ve never called someone and had that happen. 🤷♂️
When you have a call come in you have to tell it to do call screening. Has been a thing for many years.
Well, this just does it without any interaction and displays the message live in text in a notification bubble. Click to answer, swipe to ignore. Which apparently has not been a thing for many years.
Google lets you ask a series of suggested questions (kinda like the auto suggested text stuff), or you can just ignore the call. I’ve never felt the need to engage any further with any numbers I don’t already have, and not sure exactly why you’d want to, but the feature has been available for years now.
Edit - I think you can even screen the call by listening to the callers reply to the robot voice, but again never really cared enough to use it.
I’m not sure if it’s pixel only at the moment but they recently expanded the previously US only feature to screen calls like that automatically. You get a live transcript and if you missed the call you can listen back to the recording. But the biggest feature is actually hidden, if I go look at my call history I’d say a good 75% of it is confirmed spam that was detected and effectively blocked without bringing it to my attention at all.
It displays a transcript on the screen. Most of the time spamers just hang up.
Have not received a single spam call since turning this feature on.
On the other hand, I’ve had two people ask me about the feature after being screened by it — they were very excited that such a thing was possible without subscribing to another provider service.
give it time. more people will enable it, and suddenly it’ll only stop 3 a month unless you subscribe.
I can’t/won’t use the Android equivalent of this on GrapheneOS, so my only option is Telus or Koodo for Call Control which does work.
If only a government existed that could punish companies that do this. If only.
A technical solution because the political one won’t be implemented, sigh.