Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

Why don't iOS and Android support sending calls from unknown numbers straight to VoiceMail (or block entirely). Why isn't this a first-tier feature?

If such functionality were well-implemented, you'd be able to disable it for a limited amount of time if you're expecting a call, and then the setting would kick back on automatically.

Apple and Google could work together (or even 100% independently) to tackle this at the handset endpoint level, yet there is no serious investment. They both have the data to create extremely robust solutions that could kill such life nuisances once and for all. Why do they continue to sit on their laurels rather than treating this as the serious abuse it is?

I get more text-message and phonecall spam than ever. Whatever [meager] measures have already been attempted are completely insufficient and have failed.

Imagining a future where my children perceive this as normal doesn't seem right. What can we do about this?

That's like a whitelist for email because you don't want to deal with spam though. It severely diminishes the medium and makes everything more complicated.

What if your mother had an accident and is in the hospital, should the hospital send you an email and ask you to allow incoming phone calls? Could they even, if your spam filter wouldn't let their email through?

And if it's straight to voice-mail, you'd still need to spend the time to check it, albeit maybe you could check when it's better for you.

They could screen it with a voice assistant, but I doubt that'll work well, spammers will just set their systems up to say stuff that gets them through the screening and then switch to the spam once they get to you. And when the assistants catch on, it has lots of fallout because suddenly your kids' school can no longer reach you because the assistant flags everything about schools and kids because spammers have abused it.

This is the most naive possible form of the feature.

Google and Apple both have more than sufficient data to train ML models which could provide a thorough solution.

> Why don't iOS and Android support sending calls from unknown numbers straight to VoiceMail

iOS does. It’s called “Silence unknown callers” in the phone app settings.

I expect android has this as well.

Thanks, that's a start for the phonecall spam.

The iOS texts are especially bothersome because they appear on every device and machine hooked up to iMessage.

I just looked and Android does have this setting buried under several slices of the phone app settings layer cake. It's better than nothing but I'm unwilling to accept that this is respectful to end users. It's really hanging all out non-experts to dry, when they absolutely should be in control.

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