Where the iPhone Falls Short (Premium)

Android and the iPhone both have their advantages, for sure. But there’s one area where Apple’s device is curiously uncompetitive. And it just doesn’t make any sense.

Before getting into this, let me be very clear about where I’m coming from.

After having far too many problems with the Pixel 6 Pro, I switched to an iPhone 13 Pro. As I noted in my review, the iPhone is a terrific smartphone, with the consistency and reliability that Android and the Pixel lack. We can debate brands and platforms all day, but we all have our preferences and experiences. Put simply, there are specific things I like better about the Pixel, of course, including the camera system, but the iPhone is the better device overall.

Better, but not perfect.

As I noted in my review, the iPhone is saddled by an obsolete USB 2.0-based Lightning connector. The notch is humongous and anachronistic in a world in which no other phones have such occlusions, and regardless of your ability to not see it, it still takes up too much screen space. There’s no fingerprint reader, a huge problem in a pandemic world in which masks are still very much a thing. The notification system is a disaster. And then there’s the real problem: the iPhone offers no way at all to block spam calls and texts.

That issue was last in my list of cons, but then I wrote that review a month ago. In the weeks since, I’ve been inundated by spam calls and texts, mostly calls. And the iPhone’s inability to handle this problem has become even more obvious. And problematic.

It started with a series of calls from Washington state. Two in a row, back-to-back, several times per day. I had what one can do on an iPhone, which is to silence unknown callers. But all that did was put the calls into the phone’s annoying notification center. And so I would block each very similar number, one by one, to no avail. Every single day.

Blocking a number on the iPhone is tedious. The Phone app doesn’t offer a way to multi-select calls and perform actions on the group. So you have to tap the Info icon next to a call (a blue “i” in a circle)—if you tap elsewhere, you will call that number—scroll down past the bottom of the display to find the “Block this Caller” option, which is the last in the list, select that, and choose Block Contact (Contact? What?) in the pop-up that appears. Then, you have to exit out to the list and swipe left on that call to delete it.

And then you have to perform those same steps over and over again until you’ve deleted them all. I was getting 8 to 15 calls per day. I also tried some third-party solutions, but those cause other issues, including blocking (or in some cases hiding) online service verification codes. And I asked iPhone users, like Leo and Brad what they did about spam calls: nothing, they both told me.

Over time, the calls switched from Washington to South Dakota. Same thing. 8 to 15 calls per day, lots of time wasted manually blocking those numbers and deleting the calls. After several days of that, the calls switched again, this time to south-central New York state. Here we go again.

During this time, I kept thinking to myself, this would never happen on the Pixel. Google, unlike Apple, has built incredible call blocking technologies that protect users of Pixel and/or Android. (I’m not sure which if any of these features are Pixel exclusives.)

Here’s what it’s like blocking spam calls and texts on the Pixel.

Oh, sorry, it’s like nothing. You don’t have to do anything: spam calls and texts are blocked. You don’t hear the phone ring, you don’t see notifications, you don’t have to block numbers, and you don’t need to clean a list of recent phone calls. You are just never aware of them.

I proved this by swapping my SIM card from the iPhone back into the Pixel. That was over two days ago. For the first time since I switched to the iPhone, I’ve received no spam calls (or texts). No aggravations.

Is this enough to switch back to Pixel?

No. The other advantages of the iPhone still stand, and these kinds of decisions are never made in a vacuum. But this is absolutely one for the Pixel’s “win” column, and it helps to tilt the comparison back in its direction. I am going to leave the SIM in the Pixel for the next 10 days or so, however, because we’re traveling Tuesday and I want to experiment with the dual SIM functionality again—I had done this previously with the iPhone—to see how that functionality stacks up. So we’ll see.

But when it comes to spam calls and texts, this one isn’t even a fight: the Pixel 6 Pro wins handily. This is an area where Apple—which markets how much it cares about its customers so much that it hurts—really needs to wake up and do something.