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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely, Google has the end responsibility here, their handsets are simply not compliant.

But MS has f*ckd up their testing, they should have definitely caught this before it was shipped and they should have been the ones to alert Google, not some random end user.

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No matter how messed up an app is it should never be able to interfere with essential functions like calling 911. IMO Microsoft bears zero responsibility for this bug or testing for it. Android is entirely to blame here.

Yes, I don’t think “test they with the user logged out, the phone can still dial 911” is a test that any sane person would come up with, nor should they be expected to. The permutations that level of paranoia unlocks are basically infinite.

It is if 'manage emergency calling' is an option your application provides.

Microsoft, a $2.5T company, should employ infinite paranoids to QA Test every situation in all cases, always. They power nuclear submarines.

No, Teams is about as invasive an app as there is, and Microsoft may have had a much better chance of knowing that they were doing something with a great chance of destabilizing the system than Google ever did.

If Teams were any other app and simply playing nice this would have never happened. I'll bet you when the fix is released Google is going to drop one or more API calls that Teams hooked into.

Of course it should have never been possible for an App to do this to something that even the dumbest of dumb phones is required to be able to do. But Teams is a special kind of evil and it wants access well over and beyond what it needs to function.

How does an app developer test 911 functionality without actually placing a 911 call? I'm sure 911 operators would not be amused by such test calls; do companies have special testing cell networks that don't connect 911 calls through?

Companies have (and I don’t know the right terminology here, but you’ll get the idea) local test microcells that they use to test phones without actually connecting to the real network.

You can do a 911 test call. Make sure to tell them it's not an emergency instead of just hanging up. To play it safe, you can call your local non-emergency number and ask them how to do a test call. Sometimes they will schedule a test, sometimes they will just ask you to call outside of peak hours.

Where I live, if you want to test 911 there's a non-emergency number you can call to setup a test in advance. I think they do it all manually though, but I'm sure Microsoft could work something out for automatic testing, especially if they donated a few thousand dollars to buy whatever equipment the 911 operators needed.

The linked Reddit thread has a whole subthread about that. A bunch of people who claim to be phone system installers say they regularly call 911 to test that it works. Apparently it's fine as long as you tell them that it's just a test and maybe ask to verify observed phone number and location. They probably don't like it if you just call and hang up and then don't answer any callbacks.

That's very normal. Just call, say it is a test wait for confirmation and then hang up.

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