smsBlocker | Life of Android

The Story

Spam texts taking over your smartphone? Irritating automated salesmen ruining your day? Been involved in a work accident in the last 12 months?

You get the message, or rather you get too many of them. SmsBlocker is a free app that promises to eradicate nuisance text messages, leaving genuine texts unharmed by its steely, spam-eviscerating glare.

The Experience

SmsBlocker is a breeze to setup. We should point out early on that the free version reviewed here includes a free 30-day trial of the premium version which removes ads and allows unlimited additions to your ‘block’ and ‘allow’ lists.

That’s not to say that you need to manually configure each blocked number – SmsBlocker automatically sifts out nuisance messages and adds them to its quarantine folder, giving you a heads-up on which messages it’s blocked.

The spam algorithm appears relatively sophisticated, consistently blocking unwanted texts with only one or two genuine texts getting caught out, generally because the sender isn’t in your address book.

However, it will also block automated texts from genuine sources. For example, Orange Wednesdays texts were automatically blocked when we’d actually requested them.

Still, thanks to the notifications screen we were quickly able to fish them out and having to go in and grab misdirected messages is infinitely preferable to receiving a mountain of unwanted messages.

You can manually add numbers to your block or allow lists if SmsBlocker is consistently failing to recognise them correctly, but we’ve found no need to do that thus far.