How to send a call straight to voicemail

iPhone. Press the side button twice — the call goes immediately to voicemail. Pressing it once silences the ringer but lets the call keep ringing on their end for the full duration; useful when you don't want the caller to know you dismissed them. If the screen is unlocked and showing the full-screen call UI, tapping the red Decline button does the same as a double press.

Android. Swipe the call notification down or tap the red decline button. On most builds, declining sends the caller to voicemail immediately. Pressing a volume button silences the ringer without declining, matching the iPhone single-press behaviour.

One caveat worth knowing on both platforms: declining fast enough that the caller barely hears a ring is a fairly obvious signal you're there and chose not to answer.

Android has a proper feature for this and it's the cleanest option on either platform.

Open Contacts, choose the person, tap ⋮ (or Edit), and enable Route to voicemail. Their calls now go straight to voicemail without ringing, every time, while everything else about the contact stays normal — you keep their number, their texts still arrive, and they're not on any block list.

Exact wording varies by manufacturer: Samsung labels it in the contact's menu, Google's Contacts app uses "Route to voicemail" under the overflow menu. If you can't find it, open the contact from within the Phone app rather than the Contacts app — some builds only expose it there.

iOS has no per-contact voicemail routing, which frustrates people coming from Android. There are two approximations:

Block them. Settings → Apps → Phone → Blocked Contacts, or from the contact card. Their calls go straight to voicemail — the outcome you wanted — but their texts stop arriving too, and their voicemails land in a separate Blocked Messages section you won't be notified about. It's a bigger action than it looks.

Use a Focus mode. Set up a Focus that allows calls only from a chosen list. Anyone outside it goes to voicemail while the Focus is on. This is per-situation rather than permanent, but it doesn't sever texts the way blocking does.

Setting a contact's ringtone to None does not work — the call still connects, it just rings silently, and it stays live for the full duration rather than going to voicemail.

To push every incoming call to voicemail for a stretch — a meeting, a flight, a day off — you have three options in increasing order of reliability.

Do Not Disturb / Focus. Fastest, and reversible from Control Centre. Calls go to voicemail without ringing. Note that Focus allows repeat callers through by default, which surprises people; turn that off if you want it absolute.

Airplane mode. Everything goes to voicemail because the phone is unreachable. Blunt, and it kills data too.

Unconditional forwarding to voicemail. Dial **21*<your voicemail number># and every call routes at the network before reaching your phone. This is the only one that works with the handset off or out of signal, because the carrier is doing it, not the phone. Cancel with ##21#.

All of the above end the same way: the caller hears a recording. That's fine for a personal phone.

On a business line it's a leak. A large share of callers who reach voicemail hang up without leaving anything, so the call becomes a missed number with no name, no reason, and no way to follow up. Whether the call was declined deliberately or missed by accident, the outcome looks identical afterwards.

Conditional forwarding solves the useful half of this: route unanswered calls somewhere that actually picks up, so declining a call means handing it over rather than dropping it.