How to Block Spam Calls in iOS 10 with the Use of Third-Party Apps

BY Ali Hassan Mahdi

Published 14 Sep 2016

hiya app spam call blocking

Do you constantly receive annoying calls from telemarketers who want to promote and sell their products to you? The good news is that iOS 10 allows developers to build extensions for the Phone app which can detect spam or unwanted incoming calls and automatically block them.

Such kind of apps have a large database of phone numbers that have been marked as spam. When you install such an app on your device, it checks the phone number of incoming calls with its database of spam numbers and automatically blocks those that have been flagged as spam.

There are already a couple of apps in the App Store for filtering and blocking unwanted calls in iOS 10. Some even come with additional features such as notifying you about fishy outgoing calls, displaying whether an incoming call is spam rather than blocking it right away and more. Here’s some of these apps:

  • Hiya (Free): provides realtime alert of incoming spam calls, allows reverse phone lookup, notifies you if the phone number you’re calling is a spammer and much more.
  • CallBlock ($3.99): blocks unwanted spam calls.
  • Who called ($0.99)filters and blocks unwanted calls, identifies caller ID of incoming calls and more.

Once you download and install any of these apps in iOS 10, you can enable call blocking with the steps below:

Step 1: Launch the Settings app.

Step 2: Go to Phone -> Call Blocking & Identification.

Step 3: Toggle on the call blocking app that you have installed so that it can provide caller ID and block spam calls from unknown numbers.

iPhone 7 - Call Identification

Step 4: Launch the call blocking app that you have installed and configure its settings. Some of these apps allow you to choose the features you want to enable. For instance, you can configure your app to identify spam calls and notify you on the call screen, rather than blocking them right away.

Once you’ve made the changes, the app will filter incoming calls according to the configuration you’ve chosen.

This is one of the great features of iOS 10 to prevent annoying calls from scammers, telemarketers and so on. If you’ve been receiving such calls lately then it’s time for you to check out one of these apps and put an end to these spam calls.

Have you tried any one of these apps? Or are you using another app? Let us know in the comments below.