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Comment by pcmoney | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know how people could continue to trust Android when it can’t handle the basics.

And yes calling 911 is “the basics”

I say this as a former android dev, whose app was #1 in paid A/V apps back when Flash was still a thing... Couldn't convince me to use and android device these days.

Your double negative is confusing.

fixed?

looks good to me!

Have you kept up with android though? Decade old experience doesn’t mean much otherwise.

I stopped trusting Android when a constantly crashing media scanner service prevented all system sounds from playing (which means no ringers or alarms went off).

This is Microsoft at fault for building a terrible app (and why are we surprised about this), not Android. I have used my Android phone to call 911 and it worked correctly (though I don't remember if it was the year I had a Pixel or after I went back to Samsung).

It is not Microsoft’s fault. No app should be able to intercept 911 calls. Teams should not have received an actionable event at all here. Microsoft should not have to test the 911 call path.

That the thing though - and I should have been more clear in my original comment.

What if a user installs a third party phone app, with the intention of never using the standard one? That app would have to be able to send 911 calls.

A bug in how the hand off works - yes that's a serious issue. But certainly that's something that we should still hold Teams accountable for testing before they released their app, too.

edit: typing too fast on a phone...

https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Inte...

It should not happen as per the documentation, so it may be a bug on an OS implementation level, but not on an architectural one.

Why does Android allow a buggy app to break 911 calling?

It should be Android’s task to not pass emergency calls to third party apps. Even if you “fix” Teams, any other app still can do it, and you’ll never know.

If a regular user application can break the ability to call 911 from the default dialer, Android is at fault. Microsoft may also have messed up, but the OS failed by letting the bug manifest.

> And yes calling 911 is “the basics”

It really isn't; the fact that these things are called "phones" is a quirk of history and English etymology, not a reflection of how they're actually used. IMO the fact that we treat voice calls as some sort of special case priority that needs to be implemented in the base system increases the rate of these bugs (personal moan: why can't I use translate on emergency notifications? You'd think that that would be the most important thing to be able to translate...).

Maybe ‘essentials’ or ‘base requirement’ are better terms than ‘basics’.

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