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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. As a Pixel/Android user who has never used Microsoft Teams this is still incredibly concerning.

A third-party app causing this issue on accident means a third-party app could cause this issue maliciously and any app not part of the base operating system should not be capable of causing an issue interfering with emergency calling.

I assume/hope their January 4th fix addresses whatever the issue is at a more fundamental level, but this seems like the sort of thing that should be addressed a lot sooner than a month out.

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Also more reasons to not use Microsoft Teams.

I think an explanation here of what data is being sent to Microsoft Teams and now MS Teams can prevent phone calls is important here.

If my organization uses MS Teams, do my phone calls on my personal device go to my company?

Oh FFS, it’s an issue with app/dialer integration based on Android design and permissions. But, I know it’s popular to bash MS.

I’m not a teams fan, but this is taking things a tad far.

Edit: dialer has been autocorrected to diaper

I think the issue is that Teams even tries to do this in the first place. If I want to call someone via Teams, I'll fire up Teams. Or maybe add a button in the address book when I search for someone (I've got this on iOS, don't know if it's a thing on Android).

But on the dialler? When I'm there, I expect to be using the phone app to actually call the number I'm dialling.

So yes, this does seem to me like legitimate MS bashing. Even if the platform allows for this, they shouldn't be using it. Especially if the app is signed-out or otherwise out of order. Of course "it's for the customer experience" somehow, but come on.

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.

> 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.

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.)

> 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?

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is legitimate microsoft bashing. This bug implies that the teams app at the very least observes every phone number being dialed.

As a 100% remote worker, this issue is completely unacceptable. Teams should have zero involvement in SIM dialing.

And Android is defective too, a user app should not have this level of access.

> Based on our investigation we have been able to reproduce the issue under a limited set of circumstances. We believe the issue is only present on a small number of devices with the Microsoft Teams app installed when the user is not logged in, and we are currently only aware of one user report related to the occurrence of this bug. We determined that the issue was being caused by unintended interaction between the Microsoft Teams app and the underlying Android operating system. Because this issue impacts emergency calling, both Google and Microsoft are heavily prioritizing the issue, and we expect a Microsoft Teams app update to be rolled out soon

Let me zoom in...

> we expect a Microsoft Teams app update to be rolled out soon

Seems like a Microsoft issue to me.

It's a Google issue no matter what. No matter what Microsoft did in their Teams app, the fact that it was (and still is!) possible is a critical flaw in Google code which Google has the duty to fix ASAP. The problem is not fixed until it is impossible for 911 calling to break even if the old Microsoft Teams app is used, and until emergency calling is certain to work even if someone else intentionally made a malicious app trying to hijack 911 in a similar manner.

I mean, that's literally a top priority without compromise - if it turns out that for some reason they can't implement third party dialing in a way that ensures proper handling of emergency calls even in the presence of buggy or even actively malicious third party apps, then an acceptable solution would be to kill all third party dialing; there is no permissible tradeoff whatsoever between features and emergency calling.

> Seems like a Microsoft issue to me.

Amazed that you managed to draw this conclusion! It doesn't matter what apps I have installed and what they do, NOTHING should prevent me from getting a 911 call out if I have battery and coverage.

> Seems like a Microsoft issue to me.

False. Microsoft is not responsible for ensuring that 911 is available - Google is, as they are the phone hardware and OS manufacturer. Teams can only use the APIs exposed to it by Android - if use of those APIs allows 911 calling to be disabled, that's a bug in Android, not Teams.

Similarly, if an application using the standard Linux kernel APIs is improperly elevated to root because of a bug in the kernel, that's the fault of the kernel, not the application. The kernel is responsible for ensuring that even misuse of its API or a buggy application doesn't violate certain constraints that the user expects to be upheld.

> Seems like a Microsoft issue to me.

This is kind of like saying if an app crashes an operating system it is the app's fault.

The app's code may have caused the crash but the fact that a modern OS would allow an app to take down the entire system is a flaw in the operating system, and the significantly more important problem to have fixed than whatever is wrong with that one specific app that highlighted the issue.

Likewise Microsoft's code may be what is causing this issue to surface, but Android should have better protection against this happening in the first place.

Consider that if the Microsoft Teams app is doing this on accident other apps could do this on purpose, and that failure lies squarely with Google/Android.

> Seems like a Microsoft issue to me.

except that any app could do this, and it just happens to be Teams that did.

Why FFS does an F'ing app need to have access to that, particularly if it's required by many organizations?

So it can make VoIP calls from your work phone number. Now that nobody has a desk phone, such a thing is needed, especially if you don't want to pay for cell phones for your employees but do want them to get calls.

No, FFS, NO! No app should ever interfere with dialing, ever! If you want to use your VOIP app, use the F'ing VOIP app.

If you don’t pay for a cell phone what are they running the app on?

It's bigger than Teams. It's that an app can prevent such a basic, and important functionality.

The issue here is that Android has failed to exclude emergency calls from being routed to a VoIP provider. If it wasn't MS Teams causing this issue it could well have been another registered VoIP provider on that phone.

And then you get the law suit because someone in a Wifi zone but without cell coverage couldn't call 911.

It's simple. Force it to go through the regular cellular network first, and if it doesn't exist (e.g. because you're on a WiFi-only tablet) or is unreachable then try to fall back to another app.

Most carriers have their own voip gateway already built into the carrier settings to handle this situation. No voip app needed.

Why would you have MS Teams on your personal device? Does your company rent the space it uses and pay for the CPU, memory, and IO quota?

Why would you have one device for work and another for private life? I use dual SIMs on my work phone. I used to use two phones but that was just very, very, very inconvenient.

Why try to cram in two lifes into the one life you have?

I don't want to have anything personal on a device someone else has full control over.

I don't want any work-related notifications after I clock out. If I'm being paid to work 8h/day, company has my attention for 8h/day. Overtimes can be arranged, but doing so on my own will and not being paid for it will never happen.

I don't want to be held liable for leaking company secrets in case I lose my personal device.

"I don't want to have anything personal on a device someone else has full control over."

You don't want a smartphone then. From the ground up these things are closed source with smatterings of OSS in highly visible places which can be negated utterly by lower level software.

At some point we all have to realise that anything we posess electronically is only a copy of the version the three letter guys have in our files.

If the choice is between sharing my data with a three letter agency thousands of kilometres away and sharing my data with a three letter agency and my employer, you're damn right I'm choosing the former.

I even refused an otherwise sensible request from my former employer to install WhatsApp on my phone because I was not interested in using it personally, and they were not interested in providing me a work phone for it.

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