Don’t Turn on iPhone Call Screening. Embrace Calling Strangers Again!
Don’t Turn on iPhone Call Screening. Embrace Calling Strangers Again!
https://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-screening-call-people-phone-again-2026-1
Publish Date: 2026-01-31 06:08:00
Source Domain: www.businessinsider.com
It’s 2026, and I say it’s time to bring call just calling people. No calendar appointment, no text first. Just pick up the phone and call.
We must do this to save the very fabric of our society. It’s time for us to take back what was promised to us. It’s time to reach and out touch someone. It’s time to raw dial.
Right now, the beautiful art of the phone call is under attack. It’s being threatened with extinction. Those ancient skills that made us great — prank calling, having a clever outgoing answering machine message, knowing how to answer an unknown caller — those things are already gone.
Big Tech is driving this ruinous change. But we have the power to reverse course and resist. All you have to do is pick up the phone.
The iPhone’s new unknown caller screening feature
The latest iPhone iOS 26 update has a new feature: unknown call screening. This means that when it’s turned on, callers who aren’t saved in your contacts will either be sent straight to voicemail or asked their reason for calling before your phone rings. (They record their reason for calling, and then it’s spirited to you for review to make the choice whether to answer the call.)
Sure, you say, most of those unknown calls are junk. Well, not exactly — there’s already a spam filter that’s separate from unknown callers. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, but I find it’s pretty accurate in assessing “spam risk.” (Android users here will probably laugh, since they’ve had this feature for a long time.)
This feature — unknown call screening — is for non-spam unknown callers — a doctor’s office, your kid’s school, a friend with a new number, someone from work whose number you don’t have saved yet. Sure, some of these may be annoyances that you don’t actually want to deal with (I don’t want to “deal” with my dentist reminding me of my appointment, but that’s life). Still, having a phone number where people who need to…
