Kotlin

Silent Call Answering on Android: Defeating Phone Spam by Removing Human Attention

A detailed proposal suggests abandoning traditional spam call blocking in favor of allowing all incoming calls to connect automatically while keeping them invisible to the user. The approach uses Android's Telecom Framework and InCallService to answer calls silently without ringing, notifications, or screen activation. This breaks the economic model of mass dialing systems by inflating answered call metrics with empty connections that contain no human. The concept separates the technical establishment of a call from delivering user attention, forcing spammers to detect real people after the connection is made. Implementation requires the app to hold the ROLE_DIALER role and selectively invoke Call.answer() based on custom rules instead of always showing the incoming call UI. The author argues this shifts the detection burden onto robocall platforms and reduces the value of every successful connection.