Call Screening has serious issues right now leading to missing calls from genuine callers because the system does not acknowledge them with missed call notifications or badges in a lot of cases. I'm posting this in the hope of catching an engineer who can bring this to the attention of the teams working on this.
Filed as FB20678829
—
I ran the following tests with iOS 26.1 beta 3, but the issues have been occurring on iOS 26.0 as well.
I used an iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, and Mac for this.
The iPhone has Call Screening enabled with the option „Ask Reason for Calling“ The iPhone has call forwarding enabled to all devices.
Test 1: Active Focus
Turn on a focus like Do not Disturb on all devices. Lock all devices. Make a phone call to the iPhone with an unknown number.
Behavior:
iPhone: displays Call Screening UI on the Lock Screen, but it will not light up the screen. You don’t know Call Screening is happening unless you activate the display just in that moment on devices without Always On Display.
Watch: does nothing.
Mac: does nothing.
iPad: displays Call Screening UI on the Lock Screen, but it will not light up the screen. You don’t know Call Screening is happening unless you activate the display just in that moment.
In this test the caller does not answer any of the Call Screening questions and just hangs up. The result is that only the Mac displays a missed call notification. iPhone, iPad, and Watch do not acknowledge the missed call (no phone app icon badge, no notification, no badge inside the Phone app itself), you can only see the call inside the Calls list when manually looking for it.
Test 2: No Focus
Turn off any focus like Do not Disturb on all devices. Lock all devices. Make a phone call to the iPhone with an unknown number.
Behavior:
iPhone: displays Call Screening UI on the Lock Screen, but it will not light up the screen. You don’t know Call Screening is happening unless you activate the display just in that moment on devices without Always On Display.
Watch: does nothing.
Mac: displays Call Screening UI when unlocked.
iPad: displays Call Screening UI on the Lock Screen, but it will not light up the screen. You don’t know Call Screening is happening unless you activate the display just in that moment.
In this test the caller does not answer any of the Call Screening questions and just hangs up. The result is that only the Mac displays a missed call notification. iPhone, iPad, and Watch do not acknowledge the missed call (no phone app icon badge, no notification, no badge inside the Phone app itself), you can only see the call inside the Calls list when manually looking for it. The only improvement here is that the Mac now shows the Call Screening UI.
Test 3: Caller answers Call Screening questions
An active focus does not matter. Lock all devices. Make a phone call to the iPhone with an unknown number.
Once the caller answered the Call Screening questions, the following happens:
- All devices ring like expected
- When the caller hangs up or I don’t answer:
- Mac: Shows Missed Call notification without details
- iPhone: Shows Missed Call notification with transcript of Call Screening (also badges phone app icon)
- iPad: does nothing.
- Watch: Shows the mirrored iPhone notification.
Things to note: When turning off call forwarding on iPhone to other Apple devices like iPad and Mac, the phone app icon is always badged for missed calls when Call Screening was active, but no notification is displayed regardless.