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pluris 26.0 — one rule for a thousand numbers

pluris share card — the pluris app icon beside the wordmark and the line "Calls, clutter, and a quieter phone", on a near-black background

pluris is on the App Store. This is its first release. It is free to download, it runs on iPhone with iOS 18.6 or later, and it ships in 22 languages.

It does two kinds of tidying up: keeping unwanted calls and messages away from you, and clearing the clutter that builds up in your contacts and your photo library.

The prefix rule

A call centre can burn through a thousand numbers in a week. Blocking them one at a time is a losing game, and it is the game most call blockers ask you to play.

So pluris blocks by prefix: one rule covering an entire range. That is the difference between keeping up and giving up, and it is the first thing we would point at in the app.

Alongside it, caller-ID labels — an unknown number arrives carrying a name you gave it rather than a blank.

Messages, filtered on your words

Message filtering sorts on keywords, into junk, promotional and transactional.

There is a fourth list, and it is the interesting one: safe. A keyword there suppresses filtering rather than causing it. It is the escape hatch for the message from your bank that looks exactly like the messages you are trying to be rid of — and it is why that list has no limit on it, free or paid. Capping it could only ever make the free tier filter more of your messages, which is the wrong direction.

The address book, and the photo library

Duplicate contacts merged. Malformed phone numbers repaired — missing digits, broken prefixes. Country codes fixed across every contact you have rather than one at a time.

Then the other kind of clutter: duplicate photos found and cleared, and media compressed to get the storage back.

What it costs, in numbers

A vague free tier is worse than a small one, so here is the actual shape of it.

The rule is single actions are free, bulk actions are paid. Free gives you 5 blocked numbers, 5 caller-ID labels, 3 prefix rules, 12 SMS keywords in each category, and 10 contacts per import. Prefix rules are lower than the rest on purpose: one of them can cover millions of numbers, so it behaves more like a bulk action than a single one.

Pro lifts those caps and unlocks the work that happens in bulk — merging duplicates across the whole address book, repairing every country code in one pass, clearing duplicate photos at once, compressing media. It is a monthly or yearly subscription, or a one-time lifetime unlock; current pricing is on the App Store in your own currency.

One implementation detail we are glad we got right: the caps are enforced inside the call and message extensions themselves, not just in the app. If a subscription lapses, the full list is still sitting on disk — and without a check in the extension, a lapsed subscriber would quietly keep full protection.

Where the data goes

Your contacts, messages and photos are read on the device and stay there. There is no pluris account, because there is nothing to have an account with.

The whole app makes exactly one outbound request: it downloads a public, community-maintained list of known spam numbers. Nothing about you goes the other way. It is worth stating plainly, because an app that claimed to be entirely offline while quietly making a request would be lying to you.

Before you install it on an iPad

pluris is an iPhone app. An iPad will run it, but an iPad has no phone line of its own — calls and texts reach it only relayed from your iPhone — so the call and message protection has nothing to act on there. The frameworks exist on iPadOS; the telephony does not.

The contacts and photo tidying still work. If you have an iPad and no iPhone, roughly half the app is not for you, and we would rather say so here than let you find out afterwards.

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