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Comment by wilkystyle | Hacker News Reader

A simple solution for me would be if my phone allowed me to send all calls that are not in my contacts list to voicemail directly, without ringing the phone at all. Seems like very easy functionality to implement, and yet it's just not possible at all (at least not on iOS).

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This is doable on iOS.

Settings > Do Not Disturb with the following settings:

- Do Not Disturb: On

- Scheduled: Off

- Silence: Always

- Allow Calls From: All Contacts

You'd lose the ability to use Do Not Disturb to silence your phone, say, overnight, but this would do what you're describing.

Personally, I've opted in to T-Mobile's spam block feature. I don't get any robocalls.

Thanks for this, just set this up.

Yes, but this also silences your notifications...

True. This can by bypassed one contact at a time by editing the contact's text tone. The text tone edit screen has an "Emergency Contact" switch that overrides DND for that contact. AFAIK there's no way to turn on app notifications.

This setup definitely isn't ideal. Just want to share the approach for people who find the tradeoffs acceptable.

FWIW, I tried your exact configuration (but added "Repeat Calls: No") and it's been really useful. I think it's actually worth the trade-off for me. Thanks for sharing! :)

Might be a good thing...

I just leave my phone on silent and listen to my voicemail once a day. Works great. Friends and family know to text me if they need a quick response.

That's fine, and I do the same thing for the most part, but I don't want the call interrupting my music or popping up an "incoming call" screen over top of what I'm doing at the moment.

This is also simple to do with Android:

Settings - Sound - Do not disturb

To activate, once the ringer is set to silent, hold down the volume down button.

Does this also prevent you from receiving non-phone related notifications like it does on iOS? I have banner notifications turned off for almost all of my apps, but for the few which I have still allowed it, I would still like to be alerted by those notifications.

No idea. I don't use any apps that push notifications.

There are iOS apps like RoboKiller that provide similar functionality.

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