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Comment by sterlind | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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).

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