Take a look at Hiya .... Free and configurable.
Thanks for the reminder about Hiya, phred1313.
I tried Hiya about 6 months ago but deleted it because of privacy and performance concerns. I just installed it today to review the privacy issues, and deleted it again.
"Blocking" a call in Hiya is done by sending the calls to voicemail. (I don't think a third-party software can literally block the call from arriving at all; that would be a carrier function. And in any case, I'm fine with the idea that callers I don't recognize might be important enough for me to want to check the voicemail.)
Unfortunately, if I want to "block" callers who aren't in my contacts as the OP requests, I have to grant Hiya permission to text that caller to ask who they are. To do this, I have to grant permission for Hiya to access
all of my text messages. Reviewing their user agreement, they retain the right to inspect
all messages, take actions based upon them, and even to send text messages -- probably mostly in support of this identity verification.
- I am not comfortable granting an unknown company the ability to read and modify its behavior based on all of my text messages.
- The texting method of identity verification only works on calls from mobile phones. A call from a new vendor, say a home center or doctor, may well be on a landline -- which makes the feature useless.
- Oh yes, if I set up my Hiya account (an optional feature) using Facebook or Google credentials, Hiya grants itself permission to access and use any content they can scrape from those identities. No thanks.
It would be perfectly possible for Hiya to block non-contacts in the same way they block blacklisted fraudulent callers, but they choose to require access to my texts for this odd "identity verification". Not a good tradeoff in my opinion. I suspect that this highly desirable feature requires me to let Hiya monetize this "free" app by their usage of my contacts and texts.
So my current process is:
- Throw all unidentified calls to voicemail with the standard "reject" button. If I think I'm about to get a call from someone not yet in my contacts, I might pick it up -- but I usually regret that.
- My voicemail is set up to use Google Voice which fairly accurately transcribes the messages into text. I can quickly review the transcription of the message to see if it's someone I need to respond to.
- This takes about the same amount of time as the Hiya app would, without any privacy risks.