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Comment by milosmns

2 years ago

Interesting. This might not be a bug in Google's dialer (or the OS, or hardware). Based on my past experience building B2B SIP clients, I remember that there are ways to intercept many of the Android system broadcasts. I'd bet on that being the root cause. Intercepting would look like the app is crashing, when instead it would be attempting to re-route requests to a different app; someone else mentioned they detected Microsoft Teams doing that. I remember Skype also had this feature, so it sounds plausible.

In the B2B world, we often had weird requests e.g. to take over the whole phone experience and do something different – this was made possible by the same core Android SDKs that they ship both to business devices and personal devices.

For example, we were required to move each 911 call to our app first, then check if we can route it quicker through the internal PBXs, and if not – send it back to the native/built-in dialer. This was possible a couple of years ago, we built it. I assume it's still possible because it's really rare that you need this kind of functionality... releasing such an app also requires a special review from Google. Maybe Google sees it as a low risk to the user experience and allows some apps to still do it, at least until something like this issue happes.