This app has discontinued many free features and made them premium, with a subscription. But the parts that are remaining do not work well. I have the setting to Block Scam and Fraud, and Spam calls- but it doesn’t. At least, not all the time. I don’t know if it actually blocks any. I still get them, and there is no icon warning that it’s a scam or fraud. Just got another one today, with no indication- but after the call and voicemail, I checked the number on Hiya- there was a months worth (over 45) of reports and comments left, all reporting the same scam. If they haven’t picked up that number then they need to figure out why not. The listing on my recent calls still shows nothing, no comment, no icon.Update, weeks later: I had two calls yesterday, one of which I missed and one I declined, from the same number. No indication what they were. I checked later on Hiya and found that they were “debt collectors”- only after I checked did the icon for that appear in my recent calls list for this number. Hiya is always open on my phone, so even if it’s a recent number it should be updated.Another update: telemarketers’ calls are not labeled as such. I’m not sure if it’s worth keeping this app on my phone- it hasn’t “warned” of anything, but I get voicemail messages from telemarketers, since I don’t answer calls from unknown callers.

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”.

This app was meant to be able to look up who is calling you/identify incoming calls and enhance blocking options. Now they are mostly focused on being a call screener. Rather than the first screen being the lookup screen it’s now a nag screen to enable call screening. I didn’t buy this to screen my calls. I bought this to identify calls manually. Now I have to go to the “keypad” section and there is supposed to be a paste lookup button at the top. Sometimes it’s there and sometimes it’s not. And when it is there I have to give it permission to paste every single time even when I choose always allow and confirm in Settings that the permission is always allow. Lately more often than not the button is not there unless I restart my phone making it more of a nuisance than a help. Don’t think I’ll be renewing since the whole purpose of the app is to allow me to lookup calls when I want and now it’s become very cumbersome and they are just interested in me in allowing them to intercept my calls, which I don’t want. I have all the updates of everything on my phone so that isn’t the issue. The app has been problematic since they implemented the call screening. No longer worth it. It has gone from best app for call identification to very low on the totem pole. Many apps now that handle it better. Another case of an app going from doing something well to an app trying to do everything and now doing none of it well.

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.