iOS 26 takes the fight to voicemail spam – one report at a time

iOS 26 brings some useful updates to its Phone app, including two notable features, Hold Assist and Call Screening. Alongside the new design, there are plenty of little updates here and there that Apple didn’t talk about during the WWDC 2025 keynote. One of those is a new feature to the Phone app which allows you to flag spam voicemails. There’s a new “Report Spam” button when you tap into a voicemail from an unknown number in iOS 26. If it was a spam call, you can report it from there. When you tap this option, the voicemail is sent to Apple, and you can either report the message as spam and keep it or report it and delete it. 

It is not clear what Apple does with the spam voicemails once they’ve been reported. However, the company has a similar reporting process for spam messages, and it’s been around for quite some time now. It’s possible that these reported spam messages are used for building the spam filtering functionality that iOS 26 adds.

Just like with iMessage, if you report a voicemail as spam, the sender doesn’t automatically get blocked. You need to block them separately if you wish to do that. 

Apple has been putting effort into making features that cut out spammers from your life as much as possible. The new Call Screening feature in iOS 26 works on calls that are not coming from your contact and then asks the caller for more information before forwarding the call to you. 

Meanwhile, the Messages app also has refined spam reporting capabilities with the new OS update. The messages detected as spam are sent to a specific Spam folder, which is now different from the Unknown Senders folder. 

Now, messages from people who aren’t in your contact list (including two-factor authentication messages) go to Unknown Senders, and scam messages go to the spam folder. Understandably, if you see a spam message that didn’t get categorized properly, you can tap on the “Report Spam” option. 

Both these categories (spam messages and messages from unknown senders) are silenced, so they won’t bother you with a notification. You’ll only see a badge at the top of the Messages app. These features can be disabled from Settings, then Messages, if you wish to do so, but I’d recommend you leave them on. 

For now, there’s no automatic filtering of spam voicemails thought. But by how things are looking, Apple could use the reported voicemails for such a filtering option in the future. 

iOS 26 is now in developer beta and will launch officially in the fall. If you wish to try it out beforehand, you can do so when the public beta launches in July as well. 

I find these new anti-spam features very useful. There are periods when my iPhone receives a lot of scammy and spammy messages, so the filtering is great and needed. Although I don’t get a lot of spam voicemails (thankfully), I’m still glad we’ll be able to report those as well.