Since the original iPhone OS and the introduction of Visual Voicemail, calls and voicemails have appeared on separate views inside the Phone app, each requiring its own tab button in the tab bar. The Calls tab button (formerly Recent) has always been the second one and the Voicemail tab button has always been the fifth one. I’m right handed and require a particular type of thumb movement to reach the button most to my right. But then I upgraded to the latest iOS 26 beta and discovered that calls and voicemails now appear on a shared timeline. To whoever did this at Apple: Thank you, my right thumb is much happier.
If I had to guess, the implementation behind the scenes used different data types for calls and voicemails, and since items in a table view conform to the same data type, the result was two data tables, two views, two tab bar buttons.. I wonder if the team behind the Phone app finally realized these are not two separate data types if you put them behind the same abstraction. That way you can enumerate them on the same table view and voilá, one less view and tab button.
Sometimes all you need is 18 years and a good refactoring.
