Re:Pixel prevented me from calling 911
by birdman3131 on Thursday December 09, 2021 @01:16AM
(#29494409)
How else can they do it? As I understand with android they have to list themselves as a dialer to make and receive calls.
Not trying to defend the programming screwup. Just the idea that they can magically send and receive 911 calls without being interfaced somehow with the dialer.
And its not like they can always pass to the native dialer in all cases. There are plenty of no signal zones with wifi. (And before you say that 911 can use any network when I say no signal I mean exactly that.)
> they have to list themselves as a dialer to make and receive calls
Why would they have to do that? All they need to do is show a keypad and capture the microphone and speakers just like any voice chat application does. Why does any dialer API have to be involved for that?
Presumably they want to take advantage of other functionality in the native dialer, and faking out the whole dialer interface will probably produce a huge number of other bugs. It's not unreasonable to integrate with native functions and in most cases we complain about apps that don't do that.
> in most cases we complain about apps that don't do that.
In this case I don't think that thinking applies. As I understand those APIs are there so that you can create replacements for the stock dialer app, which is not what Teams is. If that's how it's been designed then I believe it is trying to take on too much responsibility.
No-one's saying they shouldn't allow for it. The issue here is they're hijacking an external app, effectively going out of its way to prevent the user from calling 911.
So I guess they're in the wrong twice.
For the record, no, I don't think this was done on purpose. But it just shows why it's an issue they screw around with things they shouldn't.