Your iPhone Can Now Screen Your Calls for You

Spam calls are out of control. When you get a phone call from an unknown number, it’s tough to know whether the caller is going to be legitimate, or if it’s going to be another phishing scheme in disguise.

If we can’t stop scammers from calling us, it’d be great if someone else could at least screen our calls instead. That way, only the important calls would get through, while we’d be spared the unimportant or even malicious calls. You could hire an assistant to do this for you, or you could simply update your iPhone to iOS 26.

Apple’s latest update for iPhones comes with a built-in call screener, similar to tools that have existed on Android for some time. When enabled, the screener intercepts calls from numbers you don’t have saved on your iPhone, all without alerting you. The screener will ask the caller to share their name, as well as the reason for the call. Once the caller gives your iPhone these details, your phone will share that information with you, and offer you the chance to answer the call.

In order to use this feature on your iPhone, you’ll need to be running iOS 26. As long as you have an iPhone 11 or newer, you can run this update. You can ensure you’re running the latest version of iOS by heading to Settings -> General -> Software Update.

Once you have iOS 26 up and running on your iPhone, open Settings, then head to Apps -> Phone. Here, find “Screen Unknown Callers,” then choose “Ask Reason for Calling.” You can also choose to send calls from unknown numbers directly to voicemail, if you’d rather not deal with them at all.