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Comment by cesarb | Hacker News Reader

Direct link to the comment from an "Official Google Account" on what they found: https://old.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/r4xz1f/pixel_p...

"Based on our investigation [...] We determined that the issue was being caused by unintended interaction between the Microsoft Teams app and the underlying Android operating system. [...] If you have the Microsoft Teams app downloaded, but are not signed in, uninstall and reinstall the app. While this will address the problem in the interim, a Microsoft Teams app update is still required to fully resolve the issue. [...]"

Now I'm really curious as to what that "unintended interaction" was.

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My guess is two programs were trying to register themselves as the phone call app, Teams won, and didn’t know how to 911.

Damn, your guess sounds quite plausible.

Also, everything is awful.

Also, everything is awful.

Not so much awful as "Star Trek."

Star Trek was always upheld as a model of the future. But instead of transporters and replicators and space travel, we got all the bad stuff from Star Trek.

Everything breaks all the time. Technology doesn't do what we expect it to do. The latest, greatest inventions are held together with gum and bailing wire. Computers let us down when we need them the most.

We are living Star Trek.

Computers only do what they're told to, I don't think it was them that did the letting down.

Somehow in Star Trek the video conferencing always works on the first try which is definitely not how things work in our reality.

Actually I can guarantee you that our defence force vehicles, aircrafts, ships, etc. all have communication that works every first time.

Big difference. One is a purpose built machine, the other is an app on your multi-purpose computer.

That isn't true at all. If you read the postmortems on the USS McCain and USS Fitzgerald collisions, you'll find that one of the contributing factors was the fact that both ships had lots of issues with the computers and software controlling their sensors and communications. This post (https://fixvms.com/) on the mapping software for the US submarine fleet doesn't raise confidence either.

The military works because everyone expects everything to be eternally broken at all times.

And is pleased when it isn’t.

Issues with software controlling communications isn't the same as issues sending communications.

If you're telling me there are ships running in the defence force that can't actually communicate with other people at the drop of a hat, at all times, then how is that even possible? That requires some serious negligence.

In a lot of instances, if the system fails, the plane falls out of the sky, so I am pretty sure we're doing that well.

Indeed it does, but unfortunately ships have to be designed to constraints other than, "Works perfectly all the time, even in combat." For example, one of the reasons that the British lost HMS Sheffield during the Falklands War is because, due to issues with her antenna layout, she was unable to use her radar and satellite communications at the same time. When the Argentine planes launched an Exocet at her, she was in the middle of using the satellite antenna, and thus missed the incoming missile. Why was the antenna layout so boneheaded? Budget cuts during the shipbuilding program, which forced a reduction in size and consolidation of antennas.

In a lot of instances, if the system fails, the plane falls out of the sky, so I am pretty sure we're doing that well.

The numerous issues we've had with communication and sensor fusion on the F-35 indicate that we aren't. Now, the military absolutely assures us that those issues have been resolved and the F-35 is great now, but I think I can be forgiven for not taking their word 100% at face value.

I've been using video conferencing software, and hardware in a few cases, for about 20 years, and I don't remember the last time it failed to connect first time. It definitely used to but that hasn't been a problem for a very long time.

I run into problems with video conferencing applications on a semi-weekly basis. The most common is when the dialin number (I use a desk phone for the sound quality) connects to one of their "bad" lines and [doesn't connect, is delayed, can't hear anyone, nobody can hear me, etc... pick your failure of the day]. But there's many times where it fails in other, purely software ways.

maybe not the connection, but definitely audio and video not working the first time you connect isn't uncommon.

It seems like we're heading towards Lexx more than Star Trek.

Everything is Microsoft.

Microsoft made a special point of getting people used to the idea that nothing can be expected to work right. Before Microsoft, if something didn't work, you sent it back for a refund, angrily. Since, it is "Have you tried rebooting it?" No refunds, ever.

Everybody else relaxed into a Microsoft level of expectation. Anybody who doesn't, spends money their competitors don't.

(If you are too young to remember: this is literally true.)

This is not accurate. All complex software has had bugs since Grace Hopper's moth, at least, and it was never common to seek refunds because of software errors. Microsoft is only notable because DOS and Windows became ubiquitous in a way that no previous software had, exposing the whole world to unreliable software.

(I've been a professional programmer since the mid 1980's, so I do remember. )

> This is not accurate

Have you used Office? Whatever those apps are now, online, in Teams, stand-alone, it’s a steaming mess. Various functions work in various places and things like moving an image are just ridiculously broken.

It isn’t this bad with other vendors.

I see your Microsoft office and raise you blackberry work.

I never said Microsoft makes good software. Indeed, Office is often very buggy.

My point is that Microsoft isn’t unusual in this regard at all, except that their software has become very popular. In other words, people experience Microsoft bugs very often, not because Microsoft software is unusually bad, but because Microsoft’s software is unusually prevalent in the world.

This is unfair. The requirements for consumer software have become exponentially more complex during Microsoft's tenure as leader. Hardly anything worked quite right in the 90s or 00s.

Microsoft dominated the '90s and '00s. QED.

I take it you haven't used an old Macintosh or Amiga recently.

Microsoft long predated those. Apple ][ did not crash.

Microsoft predated the Apple ][ too, but it's moot either way. Was MS-DOS so buggy and so profoundly influential that it dramatically lowered Apple's standards - and everyone else's - over the course of the two and a half years between the launch of the IBM PC and the launch of the Macintosh?

Macintosh and Amiga, without any sort of memory protection, could easily be made to crash by bugs in any program. But crashing was the exception, and an embarrassment to be fixed as quickly as possible.

Windows, instead, absolutely routinely crashed every day, or even several times a day. A few people managed to keep it up for days between crashes. It would crash even when you weren't using it.

I had an Apple A/UX system that stayed up for months at a stretch. That was simply normal for Unix, and later Linux. Even in the mid '90s it was expected that a Linux system would be rebooted only after you deliberately shut it down to upgrade to a new release or install new gadgets. (This was before there was USB.)

Microsoft ended up redefining crashing to mean, not just needing to reboot, but failing to reboot so you would need to re-install the OS, because something got corrupted on disk. It was totally normal and expected to need to reinstall Windows every few weeks or, sometimes, months, and everyone got used to that.

How did Microsoft become so popular in spite of all that?

Hardware agnosticism (the huge PC-compatible industry of cheap computers), corporate standards and Office apps, and abusive business practices.

Look up "monopoly". Users are not the customer. Equipment had, as it still does, MS pre-installed. You could not buy a system without, and contracts were written such that vendors could not afford to offer an alternative.

Microsoft worked fine for the actual customers, the system integrators, because all it needed to do was install and register. Once the system was delivered to their customer, software failures were Somebody Else's Problem, and did not affect the actual customer.

Economically speaking, software failure costs were exported to the hapless users, who were not sophisticated enough to blame anybody, and not in a position to demand satisfaction from anybody.

Why does Android even allow third-party apps to handle 911? This isn't just a Teams bug, this is a design bug in Android. I have Teams installed and now I'm worried about this too.

It seems more like the problem is that it doesn't -- and there's no graceful fallback

I am looking forward to people getting outraged once again when Android does not allow third-party apps to handle 911. There'd be dozens of articles on HN about how Google is being anti-competitive and outrage will keep pouring in.

HN might bean outrage machine some days, but like every Voip thing ever says you can't call emergency services with them. I always believed it to be a SLA deficiency in consumer internet? I'm guessing a strong preference for the real cell network to handle the calls would be necessary until this changes. Unless you can actually swap out the "phone" app on Android to have a 3rd party app make a real phone call?

Yes, any app can be a phone app ("dialer" in Android parlance), and there is a user preference to determine the default dialer app for sending and receiving calls.

In fact, Google has themselves made several available over the years; Hangouts and Google Voice are two examples.

There are definitely SIP trunks that allow 911 calling. Mine does, and they also allow you to pay for E911.

In fact Teams itself has E911 support, you have to enable it if you setup a phone number PBX.

What is missing is a way to say “emergency call failed” and pass it to another handler (perhaps even a low-level one built into the cellular part of the phone itself).

I like this feature, it means I don't need to use the crappy dialer that some manufacturer made for me. It's also a good feature for VoIP apps because Android's built-in SIP client works but isn't very clear when something goes wrong.

It could be that there is some kind of design bug (no way for a dialer to indicate that emergency numbers cannot be dialed) but it could also be an actual Teams bug (Teams indicates that it can dial 911, sets up a connection that dies in the background).

Because it specifically happens with Teams installed but not signed in, my guess is that the latter is the problem: Teams tells the OS "yeah sure let me dial that for you" but then doesn't complete the call because it wants you to log in to MS first. Reinstalling the app, as suggested, would kill all associations with the standard dialer, but an update from MS is necessary to fix the main bug. I have a feeling the promised update for 2022-01-04 will remove the ability for these dialers to call emergency numbers all together.

In my opinion there should at least be a setting (enabled by default) to send emergency calls through the system dialer, if it's not enforced automatically already.

Android lets third-party apps replace the entire calling process, so depending on the setup there is no OS component that even knows what number you are trying to dial before the dialer actually tells the OS about it.

Not sure if Teams does that, if not I guess it would be possible, although I'm not sure if there aren't cases where suddenly a different (=an OS component) app than the user expects taking over also would be bad, e.g. if someone used a special dialer for accessibility purposes. Maybe this should be behind special review and testing, at least this specific bug here seems like it'd have been easy to catch if emergency calling behavior was tested.

I am amazed that no one at Google thought of what might happen if an app replacing the calling stack failed to dial 911.

Maybe they thought, we could be like Apple and force everyone to use our apps or else... Or we can allow 3rd party dialer apps and notify the user of the risk deep in a ToS agreement.

ToS won't save them from a lawsuit in case of 911.

Especially because it was not signed in. Teams doesn't make any phone calls without being signed in, even 911.

It shouldn't really register itself as a phone app IMO. And on my oneplus it doesn't appear to have even tried.

The person was able to make other calls right before the attempted 911 call, though, so while it could be something like this it seems like it might be more complicated.

> "a Microsoft Teams app update is still required to fully resolve the issue"

Lol, Google claims no responsibility?

> uninstall and reinstall the app

No matter how much things change, the solutions remain the same.

Can't call 911? Did you try turning it off and on again?

"unintended interaction" is newspeak for life-threatening defect, now.

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