[HN Gopher] Show HN: CallStop - Superhuman for your phone number
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Show HN: CallStop - Superhuman for your phone number
Robocalls and unwanted calls are one of the biggest hassles these
days. Over 50% of phone traffic is spam. I'm the founder of
CallStop: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/callstop/id1455892856
CallStop allows you to: - Block 100% of robocalls on your current
number, using your contacts as a whitelist - Effortlessly email
call invites to an any email (that can be joined in one tap, the
PIN is embedded), where the recipient can only call you starting 5
minutes before the meeting start and up until 5 minutes after the
meeting end - Pause call filtering and have it automatically
resume after a certain time - Accept whitelist requests to join
your whitelist, and receive notes from the callers prior to
accepting - Specify PINs you can give to loved ones or groups to
reach you from unknown numbers. - Get a second phone number with
which you can give out in lieu of your primary. CallStop is a
productivity tool that lets you better manage your time and who can
reach you. If you're expecting a call from a business from an
unknown number, or want to limit a salesperson from calling you
more than once, CallStop is perfect for managing these
interactions.
Author : davidajackson
Score : 44 points
Date : 2020-02-01 17:39 UTC (5 hours ago)
| chadwittman wrote:
| I really wish this would have come out like 4 years ago. I love
| the idea, but Apple's newest iOS helped significantly cut down on
| the robocall annoyance. I'm cheering for you!
| AgentK20 wrote:
| Any plans for Android? Would happily pay for a service like this.
| aloukissas wrote:
| Don't know about generic Android, but this works pretty well on
| Pixel. Automatic "call screen" has eliminated my spam calls to
| almost zero.
| mceachen wrote:
| Android's built-in "do not disturb" setting supports silencing
| all phone calls from numbers not in your address book.
| dangoor wrote:
| iOS supports this too: https://support.apple.com/en-
| us/HT207099
| ZARinfluencer wrote:
| How long is waiting list for your app?
| martin_a wrote:
| People! You really need to get into politics or whatever and fix
| those things from a legal side!
|
| You really need to stop inventing services and starting
| businesses for the most simple things in life!
|
| edit: Don't get me wrong, I love the spirit, but there are _real_
| problems to tackle and you are still working on stopping
| telephone spam? It's 2020, nobody should even think about things
| like that...
| qorrect wrote:
| What should we be thinking about ?
| armatav wrote:
| I thought CallKit only allows a blacklist of numbers to block,
| not a whitelist.
| mehrdadn wrote:
| Question: does any app (yours or others) block such calls in a
| manner that prevents them from ringing at _all_? It 's extremely
| frustrating for me when I use a call blocking app only to find
| that it still rings for a split second before suppressing
| afterward, and I have no clue why that happens with every app.
| soared wrote:
| iOS has a setting to send numbers not in your contact direct to
| voicemail and those never ring.
| jeremyw wrote:
| I built a whitelisting phone system for my aging dad with Twilio,
| an OBi200 VoIP adapter, and gcloud for transcribing untrusted
| calls sent to voicemail.
|
| (US specific) If you think the aggressive IRS and Sheriff scams
| are bad -- you've committed a crime only $100 _right now_ will
| solve! -- the shakedowns targeting enfeebled senior citizens are
| truly sinister.
|
| Which is to say, people who care for seniors (children of, part
| time caregivers, etc) are an unserved audience for tools like
| yours. I would have paid for one had it existed.
| hedora wrote:
| I like the idea of having a pin.
|
| I wonder if overloading the "extension" field in existing address
| books would be reasonably ergonomic. Eg:
|
| (555) 876-5309 ext 1337
|
| Or similar syntax should work with legacy systems to share your
| phone number (and maybe autodial the pin).
| sm4rk0 wrote:
| _Over 50% of phone traffic is spam._
|
| Please, don't generalize. That statistic is maybe valid in the
| USA. In my case (Serbia) spam is practically 0%. There's an
| occasional landline call or two per month but that's enough for
| making fun by letting our kids answer the phone and troll the
| spammers. Third world "problems" (:
|
| Anyway, I support your fight against spammers.
| NeutronStar wrote:
| Please don't generalize your own case either while you're at
| it.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Living in Germany I have received a total of 0 spam calls over
| several years.
| pzumk wrote:
| That's because there's actually a law against it. I remember
| some years ago we always had Werbeanrufe on our landline. We
| don't have a landline anymore but I've not gotten a single
| spam call for years now (except from my own home internet or
| mobile provider, which isn't "spam" per se but still annoying
| because they sometimes call you five times a day instead of
| emailing you about some minor things).
| ssoroka wrote:
| It was about 90% for me, personally; at least for a while. In
| Canada.
| bestouff wrote:
| Same thing in France. I wonder if phone spam exists elsewhere
| than in USA (in UK perhaps) ?
| ssss11 wrote:
| There's a lot in Australia
| Khamsin wrote:
| My parents in France get spam calls on their land-line phone
| almost everyday. It almost never occurs with mobile phones
| though.
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| Nothing much in the UK, maybe once a month if you're unlucky
| leokennis wrote:
| In the Netherlands, I get called unsolicited and for
| marketing purposes maybe once a month. The call is always by
| a human, I've never been called by a robot.
|
| As soon as I notice it's a marketing call I just hang up and
| if it's not a hidden number, I add it to my "blocked numbers"
| contact, which I have blocked from incoming calls on my
| iPhone.
| martin_a wrote:
| You could also GDPR the shit out of them... ;-)
| tixocloud wrote:
| Don't get much in the U.K.
| ekabod wrote:
| My parents in France receives 3 spam calls everyday, the
| first one always between 9 am and 10 am.
| _-___________-_ wrote:
| I have mobile numbers in HK, mainland China and UK. I get
| zero spam on the UK number, and daily spam calls on the other
| two, although they hang up as soon as they realise I speak
| neither Cantonese nor Mandarin, which is a good enough spam
| filter for me :)
| soared wrote:
| I would've loved this prior to getting a new iPhone, but from my
| perspective the iOS setting that sends numbers not in your
| contact straight to voicemail does 90% of what I'd use this
| service for.
|
| You obviously have some useful features though (I do miss calls
| on occasion).
| bawolff wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| I kind of wish there was like an audio captcha app. If the number
| isnt in your contacts, voice comes on asking them to type some
| random 4 digit number. Well it is of course anarms race, almost
| all my call spam is recordings so i think itd be effective.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Google voice has a feature where you can ask the person to say
| their name. Not sure if they force you to hit # after or what
| happens with automated callers, but I could imagine this being
| a decent solution.
| nlh wrote:
| Congrats on launching!
|
| One security-related question: I had looked into this area
| previously as a user and a security-conscious friend pointed out
| that systems that use call forwarding to stop the spam problem
| are a HUGE security risk.
|
| You're effectively man-in-the-middling all mobile calls, SMS,
| etc, and if there's some sort of compromise (or, much less
| likely, malicious act) on your end, all of us users will be in a
| tough spot.
|
| Is this accurate? Can you share some thoughts?
|
| (Not trying to knock your business or approach, btw - just want
| to know if the fears are founded or not.)
| runako wrote:
| Same thought here. I have been toying with the idea of building
| something OSS so that people could run it themselves, for this
| reason.
|
| (Also I have what is possibly a common filtering case in the US
| that would eliminate 95% of my spam calls without blocking any
| relevant calls from "new" numbers. And for whatever reason, I
| have not seen it implemented anywhere yet.)
| nlh wrote:
| IF (area code == my area code) AND (prefix == my prefix) AND
| (last 4 != my last 4) THEN SPAM SPAM SPAM ?
| runako wrote:
| YES
|
| Also: if (area code == my area code) AND (number NOT IN
| whitelist)
|
| Basically: I have a mobile number in an area I left 15
| years ago. Any call I get from there that's not one of my
| friends is de facto spam.
| joshmn wrote:
| > Same thought here. I have been toying with the idea of
| building something OSS so that people could run it
| themselves, for this reason.
|
| I'm in the process of open-sourcing the core part of a SaaS I
| run that does exactly this. It relies on Twilio but could be
| easily made to work with any API that exposes the forwarded
| number, which should be all of them.
| runako wrote:
| Would love to sign up to get notified when this is ready!
|
| Good luck!
| ThomPete wrote:
| Congrats on the launch.
|
| My advice is to stay away from the "Like X for your Y". Define
| your own category otherwise, you will end up just copying way too
| much of Superhumans thinking.
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(page generated 2020-02-01 23:00 UTC)