According to The New York Times, upwards of 48 billion Americans were hounded by robocalls in 2018, an increase of 56.8 percent over the previous year. That averages out to roughly 150 scam, telemarketing, and unwanted calls annually for every adult with a phone—a number expected to balloon higher in the future.
That’s precisely why a cottage industry flourishes on the App Store, supplying tools to combat this menace. Unfortunately, most call blocker solutions rely on outdated, ineffective blacklists, or worse yet, require users to do the heavy lifting by reporting rogue numbers as they pop up. A new app called Firewall takes the opposite approach: Whitelisting everyone you know and sending the rest to limbo.
While that may sound like dropping a nuke on your backyard to get rid of a few pesky bugs, Firewall did a remarkable job of eliminating nuisance calls on my iPhone X. In recent months I’ve received a handful of daily intrusions, but after installing Firewall, they were entirely eliminated.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ve tried it on our Verizon iPhones and it makes you go, “Ahhh.” Blissful silence. No more robocalls.
Not that Firewall is a free download, with a free trial period to try out the app. If you purchase the service, you will be charged a $3.99 / month. with no commitments.