I’ve had a bit of a love/hate relationship with the latest iteration of Apple’s mobile operating system with some pretty irritating bugs (although nowhere near as bad as the awful macOS Catalina release). However, there is one feature that I do love – Silence Unknown Callers (SUC).
The feature does pretty much what it says on the tin and at first seems something of a blunt instrument especially as it appears to only be on or off. There is, however, quite a bit of subtlety behind this toggle switch.
Why would you want to turn on SUC? Simply to reduce the number of spam callers whether they be robots calling about that “accident” you had or offshore callers telling you they are from the “Windows support company”. All just simply and quietly get binned.
Silence Unknown Callers in Action
At the basic level SUC will send any incoming calls that are unknown straight to voicemail. What is considered known is as follows:
- any number in your contacts
- a number in your recent call lists. This is great if you have called someone not in your contacts, left a message and then they call you back
- any number in a support app. This could be your company CRM for example so that clients calls get through.
I particularly like the latter option as that means that I can continue to receive calls from important clients without worrying that they will get sent to voicemail.
How does SUC differ from DND?
There is a similar feature in iOS called Do Not Disturb (DND) which at first glance looks like it might do the same thing as SUC. While you can set DND to allow through calls from your contacts it doesn’t have the ability to also link it to a third party app such as the CRM example above. Additionally with DND everything is silenced so you won’t receive any notifications from any apps. With SUC you do.
If you want more control over who is able to call you and particularly if you get spam calls then iOS’s Silence Unknown Callers is for you. To enable got to Settings ->Phone and then toggle it on.
Enjoy the blissful silence!