Google brings spam protection to your phone calls on Nexus devices

Spam is a menace and fact of life in the modern era and with spammers moving more and more to phone calls Google has focused it’s spamming blocking attention at them. The new feature is rolling out by default to all Nexus and Android One users running Android 6.0 and above, which for those devices will be most of them.

With the new dialer app users will be warned when an incoming call is suspected to be spam, and give you the option to reject the call. For the new app to work you will obviously need caller ID turned on.

If a spam call slips through undetected you can help Google with their efforts and mark those calls as spam. Once you have the new update simply open the phone app, go to recent, select the number in question and then tap Block/Report as spam.

You can also do the opposite if a number is marked as spam but you don’t consider it to be you can mark it as not spam, a bank would be a good example, depending on your perspective a call from a bank could easily bee seen as either important or spam. Just follow the same steps as above and mark is as not spam.

It’s not clear exactly how Google is sorting number into spam and not spam, but it’s safe to assume that like with Gmail filtering they are analysing user behaviour towards certain numbers and using that and crowdsourced data (like that entered above) to create a trust profile.

This could well be the type of improvement that Sundar Pichai hinted at during his code conference interview, where Google would be further differentiating their hardware offerings through enhancing the software offered beyond that found in the AOSP and freely distributed apps.

We haven’t seen the update roll out yet so we will wait and see if this is another Google region locked feature or if it is coming to all.

Would spam identification be a feature that would make you more likely to want to get a Nexus/ Google phone? Let us know below.