Last year with the release of iOS 26 Apple loudly touted new changes to the Phone App to help users besieged by unwanted calls. I found the difference between the promise and the actual implementation to be confusing and wrote about it here.
I also wrote about it here last spring. My biggest gripe was that in order to truly banish an unwanted spam call that left a voicemail you needed to do so three times. Third times may be a charm, but no there’s no charm in this churn.
One of my hopes for iOS 27 was that Apple would use whatever AI magic it was conjuring behind the scenes in Cupertino to simplify the process. We all get way more spam calls and texts than we want. And yet, it still seemed like Apple was content to leave this as some sort of computer game requiring multiple taps to rid our phone logs of this unwanted nonsense.
Well, so much for magical AI conjuring. The problems persisted with iOS 27. Or maybe it didn’t. Here’s the funny part. I’ve been on a kick about Apple’s consistent inconsistency of late. This latest twist gives new meaning to the concept of inconsistency.
With the release of IOS 27, I at first thought Apple had at least removed one of those three steps. After installing iOS 27 all I had to do was tap the little orange hand and the call disappeared from my call log as you can see in the video below.
Huzzah! Progress! Still, if that spammer had left a voicemail I had to manually delete that. But take small victories when you can.
Then, I noticed that it moved some, not all, of those calls I thought it had deleted to the Recents List. (See the first photo above.) That makes no sense. They were still marked as spam.
And then the real fun began.
What I thought was a fix became unfixed. It just stopped working somewhere along the line. No longer did a tap on the orange hand delete the call from the log. It was back to the three-tap finger dance again.
And then it worked again.
And then it didn’t.
And then it did.
And…the glowering specter of inconsistency reared its ugly head again.
It’s been an on again/off again feature/bug/fix/annoyance since iOS 27 was released in September. It was working earlier this morning. For a while. Currently it is no longer working.
Perhaps at some point Apple and its AI wizards behind the scenes will straighten it out and deliver a real and lasting one-tap feature to banish all traces of unwanted spam calls that survives the perpetual beta life we’re all trapped in. I’m not holding my breath.
Apple wants to release products users will love. As long as carriers profit off of spam and spam still exists, the iPhone as a phone isn’t one of them when problems keep folding back in on themselves. We all know AI can’t fix greed or slovenliness. Call me crazy, but this seems like a tech problem AI could and should be used to fix.
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