Enough Already: Call and Text Spam (Premium)

Given my ongoing experiences with call and text spam, you won’t be surprised to discover that I’ve been obsessed with this issue for months. Unfortunately, what I’ve found is a bit disheartening.

It can be summarized like so. While Google and Samsung provide extensive protection on their own devices, Apple does not. So if you use an iPhone, you’re going to want to go with a major carrier. Otherwise, you’re almost completely on your own, since mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs)—smaller carriers, like Boost Mobile, Mint Mobile, and US Mobile—offer no spam protection at all and third-party utilities don’t appear to work very well.

That latter bit surprises me: a combination of crowd-sourced feedback and centrally controlled master lists of spammer numbers sounds like a great idea. And there are examples of this type of solution in other markets—drivers who corroborate the locations of police or report accidents and traffic on Waze and Google Maps—that work quite well.

I still believe that Apple can and should do more here. And TrueCaller, a leader of sorts in this kind of service, announced recently that it had “completely rebuilt” the iPhone version of its app with native iOS APIs so that it can integrate with the device’s Phone app, suggesting that Apple, perhaps, had done more. But the new version of TrueCaller worked no better, in my testing, than it did in the past.

If anything, it just got weirder, and the service now offers an unpredictable experience when coupled with the one anti-spam filter that Apple did build into iOS, the ability to silence unknown callers, meaning phone numbers that are not in your contacts list.

Granted, it’s still better than just using the built-in iPhone controls: when spam arrives then, the iPhone displays a notification but doesn’t ring the phone. And then it displays a second notification when the spammer leaves a voicemail—which is almost always 3 seconds long and silent—but again without making a sound. (And because I was using Google Fi, I’d get a third notification, from Fi, telling me that I could listen to the voicemail or, if available, read a transcript.

With TrueCaller, things changed. (And, as noted, got weird.) For most but not all spam calls, there would be no notification about the call, but I would get two more notifications, from Phone and from Fi, telling me that there was a voicemail. And because, I think, of the way that TrueCaller works, these spammers had no way of knowing they were going to voicemail. So I was getting actual messages from them, and it was clear they thought I had answered the phone. One was a hilarious three minutes of someone almost yelling, “hello?! Is anyone there? HELLO?!” repeatedly.

So I guess that’s an improvement, of sorts. But it did little to inspire confidence or make me want to keep using the service. In fact, this behavior is exactly what led to my recent wireless carrier investigations, as outlined in Fi, eSIM, CDMX, and Me (Premium) and One Step Forward, Three Steps Back (Premium). Between the spam and some other issues, I’d had enough.

But we’re all in different places. And your reaction to this will be based on what you experience. I know many readers never or rarely experience call and text spam on their handsets and find any discussion about it to be amusing. Others understand it all too well.

But based on my experiences, and on some research, I do feel like we can make some general statements about the best ways to handle call and text spam, expanding a bit on the commentary I made at the beginning of this article. This also explains why this is such a big issue for some and a non-issue for others.

It goes like this.

If you’re using a Google Pixel or Samsung Galaxy device, you’re probably fine: these devices, as noted, feature built-in call and text spam protection.

If you’re on a major wireless carrier—AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon in the United States—you’re probably fine: these carriers all offer network-wide spam protection, and, by all accounts, it works well. (I’m testing the T-Mobile service as I write this.) Whether this applies to pre-paid and other saver plans is unclear and perhaps unlikely; here, you will need to check with the wireless carrier in question. I know that sounds like a cop-out, but there are a lot of options out there.

If you’re using an MVNO—again, smaller carriers like Boost Mobile, Mint Mobile, and US Mobile—with an iPhone or an Android handset not made by Google or Samsung, you are in what I think of as the worst-case scenario as you likely have absolutely no protection at all against spam. That is, of course, what happened to me when I was using an iPhone with Mint Mobile and then Google Fi.

On the flip side, using a Pixel or a Galaxy on a major wireless carrier is likely the best-case scenario for spam protection.

So what can you do if you’re experiencing call and text spam on your smartphone?

Here, I have little in the way of good news: you can switch to a major wireless carrier (which is what I’m pursuing), switch to a Pixel or Galaxy, or do both. If you save money each month by using a smaller carrier/MVNO, then you have some decisions to make around cost vs. annoyance. But know this: switching carriers is easier than it’s ever been, and if you approach doing so with the same dread you did when thinking about cable providers back in the day, relax. It’s usually seamless and fast. That’s one thing I do have a lot of experience with.

I’ll write about my T-Mobile adventures soon.