The questions people actually ask, with the limits left in.

One quote form is usually not one company. Most comparison forms sell the enquiry on to a panel of agencies, and each of those may pass it on again, so a single submission can reach a dozen callers inside a day or two.

Nothing was breached and nobody sold your number in the criminal sense. You handed it to a form whose terms allowed exactly this. Doorman does not undo that, and no app can — once a number is out, it is out. What it changes is what happens when they ring.

Loan and mortgage enquiries generate what the industry calls a trigger lead. The enquiry itself is the signal — that you are shopping, right now — and it is worth money, so it is sold. The calls often start within a day, sometimes before the lender you actually applied to has got back to you.

Which is the awkward part: the one call you want is mixed in with the thirty you don't, and it is coming from a number you have never saved either. That is the case Doorman is built for. Everything unknown is held quietly and listed with its reason, so the one you were waiting for is findable instead of buried. How that works.

This is the reason Doorman keeps a log instead of a filter. Anything that is not a saved contact is held without a sound, and every held call appears with the number, the time and the rule that decided it. You skim, you find the quote you wanted, you clear the rest.

If you know a call is coming you can also add the number before it rings, so it comes straight through. Most apps here make you get bothered once and block them afterwards, which is a strange way round.

Codes come from five-digit short codes, and nobody has a short code saved as a contact, so a shut door holds them like anything else.

The answer is the code window: one tap opens messages to every sender for ten minutes, then it shuts itself whether you remember to or not. Doorman never reads the message, so it cannot tell a bank code from any other text — which is exactly why this is a timer you open rather than something clever we claim to detect. It is friction, chosen over leaving the door open to everyone permanently.

One thing worth knowing, because we measured it rather than assumed it: from Android 15 the system hides the contents of a message it believes holds a one-time code, from every app that is not a paired watch. The message still reaches you and your messaging app still shows it. What changes is that Doorman cannot, so the code will never appear in your door log or your summary — only the fact that something arrived.

Not from inside Doorman, and this one is a platform limit rather than a feature we have not got to yet. Android only lets the app that owns a notification channel exempt itself from Do Not Disturb, so per-app exceptions live in Android's own settings.

Doorman can take you straight to that screen and nothing more. We would rather say that than imply the switch is ours.

Probably, and that is not ours to promise either way. Android lets a screening app silence a call or decline it. A silenced call still rings out at the other end, and what happens after that is your carrier's forwarding behaviour.

There is a second cost worth knowing before you install anything. Taking the screening role takes it away from whatever your phone or carrier was doing before. On our own test handset that moved roughly two and a half calls a day out of the blocked column and into the missed one. The phone got quieter; the mailbox did not. The Line exists because of this.

No. It sees who a notification came from and which app sent it, never a word of what is inside. There is no messaging permission anywhere in the app, so this is not something we could quietly change our minds about later — it would take a new permission, and you would be asked.

No. By the time a notification reaches Doorman, Android has already swapped in the contact's name if it knows one. A name means someone you know, a bare number means a stranger, and that is the whole test. It needs your address book about as much as a doorbell does.

No. A held text keeps its place in your notification shade and a held call still turns up in your call log. There is no code path in the app that can suppress either one, and a test fails the build if somebody adds one.

This is the complaint that dominates the reviews of every competitor we read: people who missed something and found out days later, with no record of what happened. Why we built it this way.

No, and the difference is the product. A spam blocker keeps a database of numbers other people reported, and decides on your behalf whether a caller is bad.

Doorman holds no such database and never labels a caller. It applies rules you set — saved contact or not, on your list or not, expected before a date or not — and then shows you everything it did, with the reason. An unauthorised caller is unauthorised, which is a statement about your list, not an accusation about them.

Screening calls to your own number is free, permanently. The Door — texts, app notifications and the log — is $9.99 once, after fourteen days free. It runs on your phone and costs us nothing per month, so charging you monthly would be charging you for nothing.

The Line, a number we answer on your behalf, is not released yet and cannot be bought. When it arrives it will be $5.99 a month, because a real phone number is rented every month and every answered second is billed. The full breakdown.

The door opens. You get the ordinary phone back. We are not going to hold your texts hostage to make you pay, and screening stays free regardless.

The Door is a single payment, so there is nothing to lapse there at all.

Not yet. Doorman is Android first because the two mechanisms it stands on — a call screening role, and a Do Not Disturb rule an app can own — are available to third-party apps on Android and are not available on iOS in the same shape.

We would rather ship one platform properly than two badly.