Since you have a cell phone in 2024, you are no doubt accustomed to your phone ringing and an unfamiliar number flashing on your screen. When that happens, I'm sure you're like me and either ignore the call or send it to voicemail thinking it's a spammer, robot caller, or some other nuisance.

I don't know if this problem will ever go away. But I do know that Apple has announced plans to make it easier for legitimate businesses to identify incoming calls.

Apple Business Connect is a service Apple launched last year to give businesses, large and small, control over how they appear throughout Apple's ecosystem, including business cards in the Maps app and Tap to Pay support. Business Connect will see its results in business searches in Maps, payments in Wallet, and using Siri to search for information on stores and restaurants.

Apple announced yesterday (October 16) additional tools to Business Connect, some of which will be for consumers in the near future, but one of the additional tools coming next year caught my attention: in 2025, businesses will be able to register their business caller ID through Business Connect, and in 2025, businesses will be able to register their business caller ID through Business Connect, be able to display the company name, logo, and even specific departments on the incoming call screen displayed on the iPhone. With this kind of information, people will not only know who is calling, but they will also know that it is a call from a real business and not a call from a makeshift operator promising interest-free housing or a luxurious vacation.

To take this example further, let's say you have a prescription from a pharmacy chain and they call you to let you know that your prescription is in stock; with the Business Caller ID feature provided by Apple Business Connect, they can display their logo on your The Business Caller ID feature provided by Apple Business Connect allows you to display the pharmacy's logo on your iPhone's call screen.

Other Business Connect additions announced by Apple this week are more direct: the Branded Mail feature is like Business Caller ID, allowing you to display your brand name or logo in emails delivered to the Mail app. This change takes advantage of an update that will be introduced to Mail later this year through iOS 18, which will split the Mail client into different inboxes, including one dedicated to promotional emails.

In addition, Tap to Pay now allows businesses to display their logo instead of a category icon when people use their iPhone to pay at a payment terminal. This feature is intended to visually reassure customers that they are purchasing from a legitimate company.

There are other Business Connect changes announced by Apple, most of which involve the back end of how businesses use the service through Apple's web portal. From a consumer's perspective, however, no change is more important than the one that should help them better handle incoming calls and distinguish the real from the fake.