DND / Whitelist calls aaaand messages?

[Ph.D.]

Hello,

I just moved from Android to an iPhone. It's very nice in some ways and very frustrating in others.

On Android, I could set Do Not Disturb while still allowing all contact's calls and texts to get through. This was effectively a whitelist and it worked very well. No more spam calls! Yay.

On iOS, it seems that this technique only works for calls. Alerts from messages are still blocked, making it less useful to the point of being potentially unusable. Can this be fixed?

By now we all know that blacklisting spammers is futile; they just rotate through faked numbers. A properly done whitelist is almost the only solution these days. So why won't phone companies implement a proper whitelist!? Wouldn't this be an obvious and useful feature that is easy to implement?

About possible third-party solutions: A simple whitelist app that is somehow constrained by Apple to have no data leaks could be acceptable.

Thanks, and sorry for ranting a little.

 

[C DM]

Hello,

I just moved from Android to an iPhone. It's very nice in some ways and very frustrating in others.

On Android, I could set Do Not Disturb, and still allow all contact's calls and texts to get through. This was effectively a whitelist and it worked very well. No more spam calls! Yay.

On iOS, it seems that this technique only works for calls. Alerts from messages are still blocked, making it substantially less useful to the point of being potentially unusable. Can this be fixed?

(Also, since getting this phone, I've been getting spam text messages for the first time in my life. Is this an iMessage thing?)

By now we all know that blacklisting spammers is completely futile; they just rotate through numbers. A properly done whitelist is almost the only solution these days. So why the F*** won't phone companies implement a proper whitelist!? Isn't this an utterly obvious and highly useful feature, and one that ought to be trivial to implement?

About possible third-party solutions: A simple whitelist app that is somehow constrained by Apple to have no data leaks could be acceptable.

Thanks, and sorry for ranting a little.

Do not disturb wasn't really designed for what you are trying to use it for. That said, it definitely would be nice if messaging could be set up to bypass it like calls. The only way to get around it is to use Emergency Bypass for each contact to allow calls and messages to come through that way. The downside there, aside from needed to do it on a per-contact basis, is that it also bypasses your phone being in silent/vibrate mode too and will always have an audible ring/alert.

Another method could be to set default call and messaging alerts to be silent and set custom ones for contacts. That way any that come from someone that isn't a contact would be the default silent alerts.

And, that aside, some third party call filtering/blocking apps/services can help as well.

 

[Ph.D.]

Thanks for responding. I was afraid that would be the answer, as it's the best I could find elsewhere so far too. This is not good at all. This one thing alone almost kills the iPhone for me.

As for apps: I read a few of the "privacy" policies of some of the most popular spam call and text blockers. They are terrifying. Plus, most of them use techniques that are outdated in their effectiveness, e.g. crowdsourced number reporting. Good luck with that when so many spammed calls are made using random faked numbers from your own area code.

Now, I heard a little about Apple having a new-ish development kit for this kind of thing that may, in part, be intended to set some default level of privacy. But it's not clear which, if any, apps use and respect that. Certainly few of the older ones do. Can any of these apps be trusted?