How to record phone calls on iPhone (UK guide)

Yes, you can record phone calls on an iPhone in the UK. Since iOS 18.1, the Phone app has a built-in record button, and it works, but it plays a spoken announcement to everyone on the call the moment you start recording, and you cannot turn that off. Whether that’s acceptable depends entirely on why you’re recording. This guide covers every route honestly, including the one businesses actually use.

I run ONSIM, a UK business mobile network built around call recording, so I’ll declare that interest up front. But the first half of this guide is about what your iPhone can do on its own, because for plenty of people that’s genuinely enough.

Does the iPhone have built-in call recording?

It does now. Apple added call recording to the Phone app in iOS 18.1 (late 2024), and it’s available in the UK on supported models. During a call, a record button appears on the call screen. Tap it and three things happen:

1. A short countdown runs, then a synthesised voice announces to everyone on the call that the call will be recorded
2. The call records, and on supported models a live transcript is generated
3. When the call ends, the recording and transcript are saved to the Notes app

For personal use, a disputed bill, a verbal quote from a tradesperson, a conversation you want an accurate note of, this is a genuinely good feature. It’s free, it’s built in, and the transcript is a nice bonus.

Can you turn off the iPhone call recording announcement?

No. This is the question everyone actually wants answered, so let me be direct: the announcement is mandatory, there is no setting to disable it, no region workaround, and no app that suppresses it. iOS even replays the announcement if a new participant joins the call mid-recording.

Apple made a deliberate design decision here. Call recording laws vary wildly across the world, and rather than build per-country logic, Apple built one behaviour that satisfies the strictest jurisdictions: everyone gets told, every time, at the moment recording starts.

The irony for UK users is that our law is more permissive than the feature. As I cover in Is it legal to record a phone call in the UK?, a private individual can lawfully record their own calls for personal use without telling anyone. Apple’s announcement is stricter than UK law requires.

For businesses the announcement is worse than unnecessary, it’s actively awkward. The established, lawful pattern for UK business recording is a notice at the start of the call: “this call may be recorded for training and quality purposes.” Apple’s version instead interrupts the conversation partway through, at the exact moment you decided the call had become important, which rather signals to the other party that something changed.

What about voicemail and three-way call workarounds?

Two workarounds circulate in every “record calls on iPhone” article, so let’s deal with them honestly.

The voicemail trick. Some carriers let you add your own voicemail into a live call as a three-way participant, so the conversation lands in your voicemail box as a recording. In practice this depends entirely on your carrier’s voicemail platform, it rarely works on UK networks, the audio quality is poor, and you end up with recordings trapped in a voicemail system with tiny storage limits. I can’t recommend it for anything that matters.

The second device. Put the call on speaker and record it with another phone or a voice recorder. This works, and for a one-off personal situation it’s fine. But the audio is captured through the air, so quality is mediocre, background noise leaks in, and you obviously can’t run a business this way.

Three-way bridge services. You conference a recording service into your call as a third participant. This is really the same mechanism most iPhone recording apps use, which brings us to those.

Do call recording apps work on iPhone?

Only through workarounds, because Apple does not expose call audio to third-party apps. Most iPhone “call recorder” apps on the App Store work by bridging your call through the vendor’s own conference-call service: your call is routed via their platform, and the recording is made on their bridge, not on your phone.

The consequences of that architecture:

• Latency and reliability suffer. Your call takes a detour through a third-party platform, and bridged calls sometimes drop.
• Your conversation transits someone else’s servers. For business calls that’s a data protection question you now have to answer.
• Subscription pricing is typical, often costing more per month than proper business-grade recording.
• Things break silently. iOS updates and carrier changes have repeatedly broken these apps, and you usually find out after the call you needed wasn’t captured.

For an occasional personal recording, an app can do the job. For business recording, where the entire point is that the recording is reliably there, this is the wrong foundation. I went deeper on that in How to record business mobile calls.

Is it legal to record calls on your iPhone in the UK?

Short version: as a private individual recording for your own personal use, yes, legal, and you don’t have to tell the other party. As a business, legal, but you need a lawful basis under UK GDPR and you must inform the other party. If you’re recording regulated financial services calls, you’re not just allowed to record, you’re required to.

The full picture, RIPA, UK GDPR, FCA rules, PCI DSS, what happens if you share a recording, is in the dedicated guide: Is it legal to record a phone call in the UK?. I won’t duplicate it here.

What do businesses use instead?

Network-level recording. Instead of the iPhone doing the recording, the mobile network does. You use a dedicated business SIM or eSIM (alongside your personal SIM on a dual-SIM iPhone), dial from the normal Phone app, and every call on that business number is captured on the network automatically.

Why this beats everything above for business use:

• No announcement games. Nothing interrupts the call, because nothing on the handset is recording. You notify callers at the start of the call, the standard “calls may be recorded” notice, exactly as UK GDPR expects.
• It can’t be forgotten or bypassed. There’s no button to press and nothing for staff to remember or disable. Every call, both directions, recorded.
• Immune to iOS updates. Apple can change whatever it likes on the handset; the recording happens on the network.
• Central, searchable archive. Recordings live in a secure dashboard with role-based access, not scattered through employees’ Notes apps.
• SMS recorded too, which no on-device approach offers.
• Compliance-grade. For FCA-regulated firms this is the model that stands up to scrutiny, see mobile compliance recording.

That’s what ONSIM does: mobile call and SMS recording on a UK business SIM, with recordings searchable and replayable from our dashboard, and optional AI transcription and search on top if you want your calls to become usable data rather than just stored audio.

Which option should you pick?

Using Android instead, or as well? The picture there is messier, I’ve covered it in How to record phone calls on Android. And if your team’s calls happen on WhatsApp, read Can you record WhatsApp calls? before assuming anything is being captured.

If the business route is the right shape for you, start at mobile call and SMS recording, request a quote, or call +44 333 880 4008.