I have taken less than a week to deactivate the star function of iOS 26. The filter called is to kill flies to guns

I’ve been from the night of the WWDC 25held on June 9 using the beta of iOS 26. This is the largest redesign of the Apple operating system in years, and the first real approach to how the company will implement its local artificial intelligence in native applications.

One of the most commented functions was that of Anti spam protection. A system that comes to rival some already existing, like Google’sbut in a more aggressive and less intelligent way. So much so that I had to deactivate it just a week later.

How the Apple filter works. Within the Apple Telephone App, from iOS 26, there are new ways to filter unknown numbers.

• Filter incoming calls: the incoming calls of unknown numbers are filtered. Whoever makes the call has to identify and, once we have that information, we can choose to pick up or not.
• Send all calls from unknown numbers to the voice mailbox.
• Automatically silence all calls of unknown numbers.

The second and third option are quite aggressive (in addition to the second one was already present in previous versions of iOS). The great novelty is in How Apple Applies Ia Upon receiving calls, since it is Siri who attends the person, not us.

The first day, the first notice. I receive many calls a week, more than I would like. Mainly, of messaging companies that contact me to know if I am at home. I analyze smartphones in Xataka and the different parcel companies call practically daily. From numbers that I don’t have saved, of course.

It soon realized that they were calling me from a parcel company, and the delivery man was not answering the questions of Siri. How do I know? For how this new feature works.

Thanks, don’t hang up. When someone with an unknown number calls us, Siri asks him to identify and explain the reason for the call. It is not necessary to be too explicit: it is enough to say “I am Ricardo, it is important.” But here there are two issues.

The first is that the iPhone notifies discreetly when the filter is active, with a minimum vibration that we will not notice. The second is that, if the person does not identify, the phone does not start sounding until 20 seconds.

A filter that does not filter so much. Yeah The call is urgentit is more than likely to hang. It is just what happened to me this week, both with the deliveries and with a call that I received from my health center. After a robot (Siri) ask you what you want, if you are not willing (or you cannot) answer at that time the question, it is difficult to be 20 seconds waiting for the phone to begin to sound to the other person.

I saw perfectly how the delivery man hung before he started sounding and, after asking him (I had to call him later), he told me that he did not know if it was some type of fraud.

Normalize that Siri takes it. It will not be easy to normalize that Siri takes the phone. It would be necessary for practically all Apple users to activate this function, and that users understand that every time you call an iPhone, you have to go through Siri.

The most important factor of the urgent call is also lost: immediacy. A accident cases in which they call you with unknown numbers, medical consultations … No one likes calls of unknown numbers, but filtering them all, regardless of whether they have advertising purposes or not, is to kill flies to cannon.

Google makes it much better. Google Filter suspicious calls of fraud or spam has been filtering years indicating precisely that the calls are spam. If we call us a number for commercial or fraudulent purposes, Google uses its AI model to analyze in the cloud where that number comes from.

In the event that we are not clear who calls us, we have nothing but to filter so that the Google assistant does exactly the same thing that Apple does: ask the interlocutor who he is and the reason for his call. It is a practically infallible filter for commercial and fraudulent calls but in which at all times we are finding out whether or not they call us.

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