With iOS 26, Apple is finally taking the iPhone's phone app seriously

Summary

iOS 26 will introduce two major improvements to the Phone app: Call Screening and Hold Assist.
Call Screening asks unknown callers for info before ringing your iPhone, while Hold Assist keeps your place in automated phone lines until a human agent can answer.
These updates should hopefully strike a blow against phone spam and inefficient support lines, and might potentially give Apple a competitive edge over Google.

Apple has at last unveiled iOS 26, its next major software update for the iPhone, due to arrive this fall in time for the iPhone 17. During its WWDC 2025 keynote, the company was keen to draw attention to a variety of new features — above all its “Liquid Glass” aesthetics for icons, menus, and lockscreens. I’ll admit, it’s one of the things I’m most looking forward to, even if it won’t make a significant difference in my day-to-day life. I’m sucker for anything that increases phone customization.

One thing that should have a practical impact for many people is a pair of updates to the Phone app: Call Screening and Hold Assist. There’s almost no need to say anything more, based on their names, but I’ll explain them in a little more detail anyway, including why they matter so much — both for users and Apple as a business. There’s a certain rival that could be left scrambling to catch up, given its legacy of preferring a particular phone brand in the US.

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What are iOS 26’s Call Screening and Hold Assist?

How the new features work

ios-26-call-screening-2 — Apple / Pocket-lint

Apple / Pocket-lint

Despite what you might be thinking, Call Screening isn’t some form of blocking, which iOS has already supported for a few years now. Instead, when the feature is active, an automated voice asks unknown callers for their name and reason for calling without ringing your iPhone. You can choose to view this process while it’s happening, presumably giving you the chance to intervene if it’s urgent.

Otherwise, though, you’ll get an alert with the caller’s info, and the chance to accept or ignore them depending on what they say. You can see the person’s number at every point while this is going on, as well as a guess at their identity if it matches familiar info. Apple has even included the ability to send a text reply, in the event that you have enough time for that but not enough to talk.

Hold Assist solves one of the banes of modern existence: phone support lines.

Hold Assist solves one of the banes of modern existence: phone support lines. If you find yourself stuck in an automated queue, a Hold button should appear in the call interface. Tap this and iOS will keep your position in line, notifying you when a live human is finally available. You may need to be quick, mind — Apple’s wait detection system is based on hold music, which tends to end pretty abruptly. It could be that the human agent will lose patience if you don’t answer within a few seconds, given that their bosses are inevitably grading their performance.

There are some other caveats to these features. The first is that iOS 26 requires at least an iPhone 11 or a second generation iPhone SE, so you’re out of luck if you’re using anything older, like an iPhone XS.

Apple is also limiting language support. For Call Screening, these are the supported languages and regions:

English (Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Africa, UK, US)
Cantonese (Hong Kong, Macao, mainland China)
French (Canada, France)
German (Germany)
Japanese
Korean
Mandarin (Taiwan, Macao, mainland China)
Portuguese (Brazil)
Spanish (Mexico, Puerto Rico, Spain, US)

These are the languages and regions for Hold Assist:

English (Australia, Canada, India, Singapore, UK, US),
French (France)
Spanish (Mexico, Spain, US)
German (Germany)
Portuguese (Brazil)
Japanese
Mandarin (mainland China)

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Why is all of this such a big deal?

The Terrifying Global Phone Hellscape

A man taking a phone call on a Pixel 9. — Google

Google

Carriers and phone makers are engaged in a never-ending war with telemarketers and other phone spammers. There has been progress, but spammers will exploit any vulnerabilities they can — hoping to catch someone who is gullible enough to accept a call and not immediately hang up. Depending on where you live, you may be bombarded with these calls several times a month or several times a day.

At best, this tends to make people suspicious of unknown callers, and at worst, it’s easy to mute legitimate calls in a bid to avoid distractions accidentally. There was a point when my own iPhone was being targeted by Chinese robocalls several times per week, and I’m pretty sure I muted a call from a home repair crew as a result.

With any luck, Call Screening will not only silence most robocalls, but most human telemarketers too. We’ll see — telemarketers can always lie, with robocalls, it could be possible to start messages with something that fools iOS.

Ideally, features like Call Screen and Hold Assist would be on every phone around the world.

Hold Assist matters because of the decaying state of phone support lines. Many businesses deliberately understaff them, hoping that enough calls can be handled by automated systems — they never can. The result is that people often wait 15 to 45 minutes or more before talking to a human, which can be an eternity if you’ve got work, errands, or family to take care of. It’s a situation that I doubt most CEOs would be willing to put up with if they didn’t have secretaries and personal assistants.

For Apple, there’s also a competitive significance to this. Google has long offered similar features for Pixel owners, dubbed Call Screen and Hold for Me. But the fully automated version of Call Screen is only available in the US, and Hold for Me is restricted to the US, Australia, Canada, Japan, and the UK. Unless Google gets its act together, that could increase the appeal of iPhones in important markets. And of course, people already in the vast iPhone user base may be less likely to switch to a Pixel as a result.

Ideally, features like Call Screen and Hold Assist would be available on every phone worldwide

Who knows how long that will last, though. Google is typically better at rapid iteration than Apple, so by the time iOS 26 launches (mostly likely in mid-September), its support could be on par or even more advanced. That may depend on who it’s most interested in competing with: Apple, or simply other Android phone makers like Samsung and Motorola.

Ideally, features like Call Screen and Hold Assist would be available on every phone worldwide. In that sense, it will be a while before either company steps up its game.