Pro Tip: Reject Robocalls at the squeeze of a hardware button

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Reject robocalls on with a double-tap of the power button.
Reject robocalls on with a double-tap on the power button.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Pro Tip Cult of Mac bug Did you know that, if you have your iPhone set to share incoming calls with your Mac, your iPad, and/or Apple Watch, then the iPhone won’t let you reject incoming calls? The red telephone icon isn’t there. You have to either answer the call, or scramble to another device in order to bump the call without picking up first.

But there’s a great hidden trick that lets you reject any call from your iPhone, without even touching the screen.

Reject any call with a double-tap on the power button

To be clear, the red call-reject button does appear on a call-sharing iPhone — it’s just that you have to be actually using the iPhone at the same time the call comes in. Otherwise it won’t show up, leaving you hunting around to find a way to kill the incoming call.

This is annoying when robocalls come in, but with those at least you can answer and hang up immediately, with no consequences other than perhaps confirming you are an active mark. But what if the boss is calling, and you want to bump them to voicemail, and reply with a quick message. Or some other concocted scenario which looks good in an article but which would never occur in real life?

For that, you just double-tap the sleep/wake button aka. the iPhone power button. That’s it! The call will be rejected, as surely as if you’d tapped the red phone icon to do it. So neat is this trick that you might adopt it as your default call-rejecting method. I would do exactly that, if anyone ever called me.

Snooze alarms with the same neat trick

Bonus tip: This also works for your alarms. If your iPhone alarm wakes you whilst you’re in the throes of a particularly robust hangover, then you can snooze it without even looking at the screen. Just squeeze the same sleep/wake button once to snooze, and go back to sleep.

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