Want to block ambulance-chasing lawyers?  Friends you don’t like anymore?  Random strangers?

Normally blocking incoming callers on the Android platform is easy: register their number as a contact, then select ‘block this caller’ from their contact entry.  However calls where caller-id is withheld or not known don’t have the equivalent under Android unless you use an app, and those apps would normally ask to have access to all your contacts and their details – surely a privacy warning!

I was randomly set upon by some law firms who wished me to claim personal injury for a no-fault accident in my car.  The fact that I was stationary at the time and received no injury didn’t deter them, so I looked for another way of doing this.  Google is your friend, of course and somewhere on the internet this little gem appeared.  Almost all the calls have dropped to zero now, along with blocking them on my home telephone line using a powerful wifi router from AVM, and by migrating my phone line physically to a VOIP system which allows greater control (- and that was done before the calls started, for cost reasons).

The easy answer is to create a entry in your Google userid contacts, the same one which you sign in on your telephone, with a list of phone numbers in text such as ‘Unknown’, ‘(Unknown)’, or ‘Private number’.  The reason for doing it off the phone is that the phone person app, which edits your contacts, does not allow text numbers, only numeric numbers.  This may vary of course by hardware – but the offline editing works for them all.  Now when your Google id is synced to your phone it will have a new entry with those numbers, and you can then edit them and select to block the caller.  Simples!