Apple is taking the iPhone war against Android to phone calls | #DaNews

Apple has spent years slowly making green bubbles feel like a lesser type of message: no typing indicators, small photos, no end-to-end encryption. But these restrictions have always been limited to iMessage conversations; use any other app on your iPhone, and there's generally parity with Android. However, with iOS 17 later this year, Apple will extend these platform differences to phone calls, adding a conspicuous signal that your friend or family member might have chosen the wrong phone.

The major change comes from Apple's new contact poster feature for phone calls, one of Apple's banner improvements for iOS 17. When you set up a contact poster, you choose a photo of yourself that fills the entire screen of an iPhone along with the font displaying your name. The ambiance is very similar to customizable lock screens added with iOS 16. Then, when you call someone, your personalized contact card takes up their phone screen instead of the large blank page that appears today. (You can particularly limit sharing to contacts or request iOS to ask if you want to share it).

Sounds useful, right? It's like having a good profile picture on a social network, which can actually be quite important. I suspect you generally don't trust people who don't have a profile picture on Twitter or Instagram. And since contact posters are compatible with Apple's CallKit tools for developers, it's probably not just Apple's phone app that will use them.

However, there are no indications that this feature will be offered on multiple platforms. So, if you don't see one when someone calls you, it's an immediate clue that the person might be a random person, a spammer, or gasp! — not using an iPhone. (Although if someone doesn't have a contact poster but you think they should, you can create contact posters for other people in your contacts).

Contact posters will also be displayed when exchanging contact information between iPhones using the new NameDrop feature. Of course, it's unclear if anyone will actually use NameDrop, but if it gains some traction, you'll look pretty bad in the bar if you're not on a phone that can use it.

Source: The Verge