TL:DR – For those that are simply interested in an Android Call Whitelist Application that Is Not Evil – Go Here - felenasoft.com

Corporate “Little Evils” come in many forms and one of those was a recent dirty move by ATT.

I have been an ATT cellular subscriber for a couple of decades now, and my current phone number is one that I have had for about half that time and through at least 3 professional roles. Because of this I get a LOT of unwanted calls, across a spectrum ranging from genuine SPAM and Fraud, to a long, long list of technology company sales folks who all want just “5 minutes of my time” to tell me why their solution is the best.

Reporting these is largely useless as those with evil intent will simply fake and/or rotate the numbers they use, and cold calls from businesses are almost impossible to get blocked because they are, well, considered legitimate as the numbers are real and published.

The solution for those of us seeking some sanity in our cellular lives is a Whitelist. For the uninitiated, a Whitelist is usually your contacts folder, tied to an application with a simple set of instructions that only allows Phone numbers in your contacts folder to ring-through, typically moving all the rest to Voicemail.

Simple, right? So simple that one would think that this would (or should) be a built-in capability for all cellular phones.

That is where that “Little Evils” comes in…

Those Sales Companies? Those Loan Companies? Those Collections Companies? They are all major paying customers to telecommunications carriers, and shell out a whole more $$$ to them than you ever will. And set up properly, Whitelists are highly effective. So effective that if used widely, it would seriously damage the revenue stream for everyone involved.

Because of this, in some ways, ATT has been a bit of outlier for the last several years as they offered a preinstalled product called ActiveArmor that allowed for calls to be Whitelisted. Granted, the settings to turn it on were somewhat buried into the App and not super-intuitive. Nor did ATT advertise it. But for those that knew, the capability was there, and it worked great.

Until sometime around February 1st of this year that is…

Right around then, a funny thing started happening on my phone. It blew up with calls…

Lots of calls…

Like all damn day…

The first few calls I (of course) picked up because for roughly the last 3 years my phone was only ringing for people I know, and I work in a job where there are people in my contact list I have to respond to. But after roughly 6 calls in two hours from various sales people and scam artists, I opened the ActiveArmor app to find out why it was no longer working.

I was greeted with a message announcing a major upgrade to the App, along with an additional pop-up announcing "We have removed the ability to configure calls from numbers not in your contacts to be sent voicemail because it's now part of your OS settings"

In other words, the Whitelist functionality has been removed.

Oh, and the “now part of your OS settings”? They are referring to this:

Unfortunately, all this appears to block are, quite literally, unknown calls. Legitimate registered numbers (you know, all the ones that come from telemarketers, sales people, etc…) ring through just fine.

In looking at the increasing number of 1-star reviews the ATT ActiveArmor app is beginning to accumulate, it is fairly obvious that they know this was a deliberate move on their part, and their comments to complaints continue to dance around the fact that Whitelisting has been removed. That they have committed a “Little Evil” in name of profit probably should not be surprising, but it remains frustrating all the same.

Fortunately there does seem to be an alternative out there that works and it is called, simply enough, KnownCalls.

I’ve had KnownCalls on my Android Phone for a couple of weeks now. Setup was easy, but a couple of small gotchas are that you will want to remove the ATT ActiveArmor App and disable “Block calls from unknown numbers” setting in your Android Phone App, as Android only allows one App to perform Caller ID functions. Once installed and running however, set up is a snap, with one simply enabling the Whitelist function:

That’s it. Only numbers in my contacts folder ring through again. And sanity has returned to my phone.

The bonus is that currently KnownCalls is completely free. No charge, no ads, no tracking. Someone should be giving FelenaSoft a medal for this.

Anyway, if you were one of the folks who have found yourself recently screwed-over by the change made to the ATT ActiveArmor App, you should give KnownCalls some real consideration (link to them at the top of this post)

- MEK