[birdman3131]

Teams is VOIP. Legally they HAVE to allow for and setup 911 calling.*

Yes they royally screwed up. But its not like they could have just ignored Ray Baum Act/ Kari's Law.

*I think for non static location devices like cellphones or softphones the law does not kick in for a bit. For deskphones or say a voip phone you take home from work it has been in effect for a while now.

[vladvasiliu]

> Teams is VOIP. Legally they HAVE to allow for and setup 911 calling.*

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.

[birdman3131]

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.)

[shawnz]

> 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?

[zmmmmm]

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.

[shawnz]

> 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.

[bb88]

But they don't need to inject themselves in the dialer. I think that's the clear takeaway.

[birdman3131]

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.

[vladvasiliu]

Can't the app have an internal dialler? They have their own iOS. I seem to remember Whatsapp on Android had this, but it was a long time ago, and I may be mistaken.

[birdman3131]

Under the hood I would expect it to still be hooked into the dialer system api that google exposes. Likely this was where the undefined behavior showed up.

[jmspring]

Android allows VOIP apps to register as a dialer. They have allowed this for YEARS. One company I worked with some years back was looking at working with phone vendors who based their phones on Android about replacing the default dialer. It didn't happen, but it was an option even a decade ago.

The programming screwup? Yes, that is a Teams thing.

I personally wonder if this situation gets even goofier with Work/Personal profiles on Android. It's not something I have looked into. I have a Pixel 5 as my "work" phone and it has the profiles. But I rarely use it for anything but messsaging/Teams meetings/etc.