CallKit: Blocked Calls Appearing as Unanswered in iOS 18

App & System Services Core OS CallKit

Papaductions OP

Created Sep ’24

Replies 18

Boosts 1

Views 1.3k

Participants 4

Hello Apple Developer Community,

I'm developing a call-blocking app for iOS and have encountered an issue with iOS 18. Despite calls being successfully blocked by our app's Call Directory extension, they are still appearing as unanswered calls in the native Phone app.

Details:

iOS version: 18
App uses CallKit and Call Directory extension
Calls are blocked successfully (not ringing on device)
Blocked calls show up as "Unanswered" in Phone app's recent calls list

Expected behavior: Blocked calls should not appear in the Phone app's recent calls list.

Actual behavior: Blocked calls appear as "Unanswered" in the recent calls list.

Answered by DTS Engineer in 813905022

Would it be possible to reconsider this behavior in a future iOS update?

This should be fixed in the most recent seed release (iOS 18.2 beta 3, 22C5131e). I don't have an example at hand to look at, but I believe blocked calls should be labeled in recents and "Blocked" and (I think) also include a reference to "what" (like your app) actually blocked them.

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Kevin Elliott
DTS Engineer, CoreOS/Hardware

Boost

Papaductions OP

Bumping this post, as the bug is still not fixed in iOS 18.2 as promised. Blocked calls still appear as "unanswered" in the Recents Tab in the Phone app.

This behavior change is having a significant negative impact on our business:

We're receiving numerous negative App Store reviews
Users are uninstalling our app thinking it's not working
Our support team is overwhelmed with complaints about this issue

This system-level change has severely impacted user trust in call blocking apps and is causing real business damage to developers.

Any timeline on when this counterintuitive behavior will be addressed? Our users and business continue to suffer from this change.

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

@DTS Engineer Following up, have you had a chance to review the feedback report (FB16093992)? The behavior with blocked calls appearing as "unanswered" is still present in iOS 18.2. Any insights would be appreciated.

The short summary is that, yes, there are still edge cases that will end up being labeled as "unanswered" in iOS 18.2. That behavior is still considered a bug which the engineering team will need to resolve in a future update.

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Kevin Elliott
DTS Engineer, CoreOS/Hardware

Papaductions OP

Thanks for the update, we hope that this will be resolved.