Hiya: Spam Blocker & Caller ID

I love this app and thanks to its features I am not getting so many spam, and annoying calls. Even being on the Governments DoNot Call List does not stop these Telemarkerter’s and scammers as they change numbers so frequently. This app with a huge community reporting these behaviors at least gives a person a heads up before answering their phone. Now they have added a feature which you can buy if you have the need too that identifies the caller ID. Just not having my phone ring 20 times a day with these nonsense callers is finally giving me some peace. Scammers/crooks are always trying to find ways around these apps. and are changing their numbers frequently. They use computers and all kinds of methods to try to scam and steal from innocent hard working people. This app does help to protect people from that but always beware not to give out personal information nor send money to anyone you don’t know. I tell them I buy nothing over the phone and to submit their information using the US Mail. In the two years I have had this app nothing ever came through the US mail. Too dangerous nowadays to even bother with these people. This app will actually help you to actually block and report them to your social community which in turns helps others. I highly recommend this app to every age group especially Seniors.

The app is undoubtedly the best of this type. It was free for several years and I loved it. When it began to charge $3/mo or $15/year, I did not hesitate to go for the latter. The problem came when on my wife’s phone, having Family Membership, I downloaded Hiya and upgraded to Premium. The usual message from the App Store is “A Family Member already purchased this, so you can obtain it for free.” With Hiya, however, my wife’s phone was billed to my account. I chatted with the iTunes Store and they cancelled the charge, but told me I needed to contact the developer to have my wife’s phone also have Hiya Premium. However, there is no way of doing that. “App Support”, both here on the App Store and on the website, consists of FAQ’s and blogs, with no way of telling your story outside of a review such as this one. Hope it helps. UPDATE on July 2019: after several years the above has not been fixed. NEW PROBLEM: on March 8, 2019, I changed my number TT&T has a policy of letting a number rest 90 days before re-assigning it. Hiya and several others report my new number as belonging to one Kenny Sanchez. Only the “Lookup” app has been correct from a few days after I changed my number. Today is July 27, nearly five months and Hiya continues to say my number belongs to a person who quit the number eight months ago! WOEFULLY OUT OF DATE!! I quit my subscription and will get “Lookup”.

I expected Hiya to flag calls as they happen which it does infrequently. However, If a call has not been previously recorded into their database you have to go to your phone log, copy the number, paste it into the lookup function, and then have Hiya look up the number. If it is spam, you then have mark it as a blocked call, flag the type nuisance call it is, and provide further details in order for the listing to be useful for others using the app. In other words, Hiya relies on everyone reporting numbers and providing additional meta-data to build out its database. Spammers are constantly changing numbers so this copy, paste, add data routine is the process most of the time. When logging a call if the app is ‘working in the background’ it does not automatically read the copied phone number from cache so you have to manually paste it into the lookup function before it finds the number. You have to shut the app down and restart it every time if you want it to automatically pull the number from the copy puffer - also annoying; adding more steps than what seems necessary. They really should not charge for this since users are actually building their database for them not too mention that it takes too many too many steps to be convenient. Maybe simpler to just block calls in the iPhone app.

I was with AT&T. AT&T have a similar service such as this one to block and inform the person receiving the call if it’s A scam, Tele marketing, spoof calling, and etc. I think this app can do a better job at notifying us if the number is a potential spoof number. We don’t find out unless we answer and don’t get a response and have to call back to realize that the number is a non-working number. I’m sure this isn’t the first time these scammers or pests, called someone that has this app. By sharing the reported number, than the app can notify the receivers of these annoying calls can get a heads up and we don’t have to answer and have a choice to block it if need be! I appreciate that this app service does give us more control and that does prevent innocent or real business calls from being Blocked Automatically! But this app is giving no warnings of a number being a possible bad Caller. The people that are doing this, are catching on to not use any number that starts with mine. They just pull random numbers. If enough people report this, than this app can be a lot more proactive and giving the receiver of the call, a possible Warning! I’m not with AT&T any longer, so I cannot use their service and your service is the next best thing pat gives the user a lot more control instead of blocking potential Important numbers! Please work on this.

I loved this product when it came out. I get tons of spam calls and being able to block them once and not worry about that one again was really helpful. I still have to block more daily almost but it does make me think I’m making a dent in the sea of unwanted calls. I used the search feature and being able to read others comments on a number to decide whether to block or not. Now that is gone. I even believe the service provided is worth charging for the app but not charging every month for it. This information is free information but multiple companies are trying to profit off making this information easy to get but all thy have all done is make it impossible to google search and get the info for Free because all the companies pop up first that want you to pay for that free information. I am disabled and love on fixed income that doesn’t even cover my bills let alone a subscription monthly to be able to search phone numbers before blocking them. AT&T has total protect also provided by Hiya and is free and it doesn’t allow searches either so guess I will stick with them even though I did like your product better prior to “premium” being the features I really liked. I gave you 3 stars because it is still a good app it just isn’t as good as it was.