How Do I Make 3-Way Calls on My Smartphone?

You’re on the phone and want to talk to Grandma and the kids, too. It’s easy to patch them in

Edward C. Baig,

AARP

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Published July 08, 2025

hands holding smartphones with arrows connecting each device

AARP (Getty Images, 3)

I’m frequently on the phone making plans with a friend that also involves other friends. It would be so much easier to coordinate if everyone could be on the line at the same time, so we don’t have to repeatedly hang up and call each person separately. I’m told it is possible to make conference calls on smartphones, but I don’t know how. Can you help?

You can come up with plenty of reasons why having multiple people on a call is worthwhile and convenient. You hit on one: the friends-making-plans scenario.

But you can also imagine siblings who live in different places wanting to speak with Grandma’s caregiver or doctor at the same time.

Perhaps you and your spouse need to speak with a broker or your kid’s teacher over the phone, but you’re both in your respective offices, working.

And you may have to make conference calls for your job.

You can always invite multiple people to join you on Zoom, FaceTime, Google Meet, WhatsApp or other video chat apps and platforms. Not everyone is comfortable with these services, however, and rounding up the troops may be more trouble than it is worth.

Instead, you’d rather make a good old-fashioned phone call and patch in folks to what otherwise feels like a normal smartphone conversation. It’s simple enough to do, whether you have an iPhone or Android handset.

I’ll start with the iPhone, but instructions on Android are similar.

Making conference calls on iPhone

Launch the Phone app and make a call like you always do.
Tap Add after connecting with the person you’re calling.
Tap the name of the second person you want to call from your Contacts list, or tap the Keypad icon to tap in a number directly.
Tap the green Call button.
Tap Merge Calls after the second person answers to bring everyone into the conversation.
Repeat these steps to add additional people to the call, up to the five-person iPhone limit, or fewer, depending on your cellular carrier. You’ve hit the limit if you no longer see the option to add someone else. The Merge Calls option will also only show up if your carrier supports the feature.
Keep in mind that only the person who initiated the conference call can see the names of everyone on the call. But any of the participants can subsequently add participants as well, again provided their carrier permits it. If so, that person will see the name of the person they added along with the name of whoever started the conference call.
You can dial an additional person when you’re already on a call, but refrain from bringing them into the larger conversation. Instead of merging the call, keep one person on hold while speaking to the other. Tap Swap to toggle between callers.

Ask the Tech Guru 

Patching an incoming caller into the conversation. If you’re already gabbing on the phone when you get an incoming call, you can invite that person to join your conversation as well. It might just be someone you were hoping to reach ahead of the meeting.

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Tap Hold & Accept.
Tap Merge Calls.

Removing someone from a conference call. If someone no longer needs to be part of the conversation, you can hang up on them while keeping the rest of the gang on the call. Hopefully no hard feelings saying goodbye.

Tap the Info button, which resembles a circled letter “i.”
Tap End next to the person you’re dropping from the call. Meanwhile, of course, anyone on the call can hang up on their own.

Going private with a caller. I’ll also mention that you can consult with someone privately on a conference call.

Tap Info and then Private next to the person’s name. I won’t pass judgment, but this could be a scenario where you want to tell one of the people on the line something like, “Can you believe what that guy just said?”
Tap Merge Calls to resume the conference call.

Android conference calls are not all that different

Android phones are not uniform like iPhones, so the procedures for making conference calls may vary slightly, depending on the model. But the basic drill is similar to the iPhone.

Open the Phone app on the handset and make the first call.
On a Google Pixel, tap More | Add Call. On a Samsung Galaxy, tap + Add Call.
Dial the next caller.
Tap Merge after the person answers.
Repeat as needed to add more people.

Other conference-call takeaways

Since you dial regular phone numbers, conference calls initiated on Android can be made to people on iPhones and vice versa. Such calls can also be placed to landlines.

If you’re on an unlimited cellular plan, you shouldn’t expect to pay more to make 3-way calls. Otherwise, airtime charges might apply. Verizon gives this example: If you have three more people on a call that lasts 10 minutes, you’ll be billed for 30 minutes.

Bonus tip: Retiring the Windows Blue Screen of Death

If you’re a longtime PC user, you’ve likely encountered the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death,” the critical error screen that pops up on Windows computers when the machine has crashed or something has gone wrong. Blue-screen errors, which date all the way back to the nascent days of Windows in the mid-1980s, might have included a message along the lines of “Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.”

After these many years, Microsoft is retiring the blue screen for, get this, a new black-colored Windows 11 screen. It doesn’t mean PC problems will magically disappear. But the company’s new messaging, part of a larger Windows initiative to bolster resiliency, security and streamline the process, promises to be a tad gentler: “Your device ran into a problem and needs to restart.”

Microsoft claims recovery time will be faster, “to about two seconds for most users” —way shorter than what happens now. The change kicks in for versions of Windows 11 later in the summer.

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Edward C. Baig covers technology and other consumer topics. He previously worked for USA Today, BusinessWeek, U.S. News & World Report and Fortune, and is author of Macs for Dummies and coauthor of iPhone for Dummies and iPad for Dummies. Follow him on LinkedIn; Threads; and X, formerly known as Twitter.