14 DAY TRIAL // There’s an actual forum thread on Apple Support discussing “how to reject an incoming phone call on iOS 7,” which reveals that numerous users are not aware of the method involving a double-press of the Sleep button.
In iOS 6, whenever you received a phone call, two buttons would appear on the screen prompting you to “Decline” or “Answer” the call. Pretty straightforward, right? After all, the iPhone is a phone first, and foremost.
Well, apparently Jony Ive and the software design teams at Apple thought different when they created iOS 7, as the new software no longer offers the option to decline a call by simply tapping a button and be done with it.
When faced with an incoming call from someone you don’t want to talk to at a given moment, all you get on your iOS 7 screen is “Remind Me” or “Message,” as well as the (obvious) option to answer the call. But no straightforward option to reject the call.
Tapping “Remind Me” allows the user to reject the call and get a reminder one hour later, but it’s a counter-intuitive option. It doesn’t say whether the call will be ended or not, even though it does reject the call.
In iOS, there has always been this “unorthodox” option to reject a call by hitting the Sleep/Wake button twice. Once for muting the ringer, twice other for dropping the call completely. It still works in iOS 7, so this is the action you're looking for whenever you want to reject a call outright.
But thousands of iPhone users out there are unaware of this option. Which is why there’s a thread on Apple Support Communities discussing the matter with 36482 views at the time of this writing.
Preposterous, to say the least, given that iOS is the underlying software of the world’s most coveted phone. Apple could address this in a future update (iOS 7.1), if it finds it necessary to do so.