Bouncer

For folks on iOS, you can install a spam filter for text messages. i.e. https://github.com/afterxleep/Bouncer

Bouncer (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bouncer-text-messages-blocker/... / https://github.com/afterxleep/Bouncer) is a free and open source SMS filtering app that has saved my sanity over the past couple of years. You need to manually set up filters, but once you do, the amount of political spam drops to 0. It uses iOS’s SMS Filtering framework, which does the filtering in a privacy-preserving way: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sms_and_call_repor...

iOS exposes an API for this Here’s a local keyword filtering app that works great: https://github.com/afterxleep/Bouncer

On iOS I’ve been using Bouncer to filter out SMS and iMessage spam using regexes. It’s been surprisingly effective to filter out messages that contain non-https URLs: https://github.com/afterxleep/Bouncer

Hey all, Bouncer developer here. The message presented on iOS is just Apple's boilerplate. It gets added to all applications using the ILMessageFilterExtension by default, without any consideration of the actual features of the app. The reason I wrote this app is because I don't trust third party developers with my SMS messages or personal data. That's also the reason is Open Source and available in Github: https://github.com/afterxleep/Bouncer, in case you want to confirm it's safe and build it yourself. ;)

This feels like a case where it'd be good if Apple had two different messages, one for SMS filters which have a ILMessageFilterExtensionNetworkURL configured (which should get the scary message you saw) and one for those that don't (which are sandboxed to be purely device-local). That said, Apple doesn't really handle the case of permissions changing with an app update very well, so launching your app purely device-local then updating to add something server-side a year later would probably let you get around that. This app seems to not have the key that'd indicate it's capable of sending anything to a server: https://github.com/afterxleep/Bouncer/blob/master/Bouncer/In... (though, you know, that assumes that the build on the App Store is directly from the source we can see...)

(I'm not associated with the app, but this is basically what I wish was built in to iOS, and it's OSS, free, ad-free, and implemented entirely on the device) Source: https://github.com/afterxleep/Bouncer From the app listing: > Bouncer a simple SMS and MMS filtering app that moves unwanted messages to the "Junk", "Promotion" and "Transaction" sections of the Messages app. > Different to other apps, Bouncer does not share, upload or send any of your personal information or SMS messages to a remote server. All the filtering happens locally on your phone, based on your own private word or regular expression list.