How do I remove the blue styling of telephone numbers on iPhone/iOS?

Question

Is there a way to remove the default blue hyperlink colour from a telephone number when viewed on an iPhone? Like a specific Mobile Safari tag or CSS to add?

I only have this in place for the number:

<p id="phone-text">Call us on <strong>[phone]</strong></p>

And there are no hyperlinks but iPhone still renders this text number as a hyperlink. I have this rendering issue on some of my websites but can't see why this is occurring.

I did read this post:

Mobile HTML rendering numbers

But is that the only solution possible?

Answer 1

Two options…

1. Set the format-detection meta tag.

To remove all auto-formatting for telephone numbers, add this to the head of your html document:

<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no">

View more Apple-Specific Meta Tag Keys.

Note: If you have phone numbers on the page with these numbers you should manually format them as links:

<a href="tel:[phone]">1-555-555-5555</a>

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2. Can’t set a meta tag? Want to use css?

Two css options:

---

Option 1 (better for web pages)

Target links with href values starting with tel by using this css attribute selector:

a[href^="tel"] {
  color: inherit; /* Inherit text color of parent element. */
  text-decoration: none; /* Remove underline. */
  /* Additional css `propery: value;` pairs here */
}

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Option 2 (better for html email templates)

Alternatively, you can when you can’t set a meta tag—such as in html email—wrap phone numbers in link/anchor tags (<a href=""></a>) and then target their styles using css similar to the following and adjust the specific properties you need to reset:

a[x-apple-data-detectors] {
  color: inherit !important;
  text-decoration: none !important;
  font-size: inherit !important;
  font-family: inherit !important;
  font-weight: inherit !important;
  line-height: inherit !important;
}

If you want to target specific links, use classes on your links and then update the css selector above to a[x-apple-data-detectors].class-name.