7 ms·

Google blocks Android hack that let Pixel users enable VoLTE anywhere

215 points by josephcsible 1y ago

leakycap 1y ago
I'm sure they had to do this based on carrier pressure, but it would be great if Google would just put more resources into getting carrier support/certification so their flagship devices will work more places.
- vitorgrs 1y ago
  And... Sell in more countries as well.
secondcoming 1y ago
> Many carriers only permit VoLTE and VoWiFi on devices they sell or have officially tested. Does this happen even if you are using a carrier's SIM card; it's just because you didn't buy the hardware from them? It's not just an IMEI-level block so data still works?
- nagisa 1y ago
  No, this is not really tied to whom you purchased the Pixel from. But it is tied to which carriers would sell you a Pixel at all. Meaning they have some sort of an agreement with Google and Google added configuration files whitelisting these features for the carrier in question. (At least for many EU based carriers.)
- numpad0 1y ago
  VoLTE was an afterthought and carriers don't trust untested vanilla implementations. So they only allow known-good phones.
  - cortesoft 1y ago
    Ok, but why block VoWiFi?
    - tsimionescu 1y ago
      That still uses their infrastructure at some point, as you are still using your carrier's phone number when you make a VoWiFi call.
      - notpushkin 1y ago
        Yeah, but what’s the problem they’re trying to avoid? Bad SIP implementation not working with their servers? Just text the user: “Hey, you’re using an unsupported VoWiFi stack, if it breaks – that’s on you.”
        numpad0 1y ago
        "That's on you" is not something that works at cellular scale. You're going to end up fighting some mafia scheme microcosm forming around that little thing.
        tsimionescu 1y ago
        I don't know, and I haven't seen any explanation either, malicious or otherwise.
    - mananaysiempre 1y ago
      From what (little) I understand, VoLTE and VoWiFi are quite similar under the hood—VoLTE is more or less SIP, and VoWiFi is that same SIP over IPsec. You see how this would be an interoperability nightmare (not that I’m excusing the telecom people for getting us into this mess). Furthermore, some carriers get testy about you avoiding roaming charges by using VoWiFi (while others actually encourage it).
Namidairo 1y ago
> that let Pixel users enable VoLTE anywhere It did a great deal more than that. It also allowed the toggling of VoNR, which apparently affected the fallback behavior of some people's services. (Ie. It would fall back to LTE and not roam back to 5G data unless nudged manually) However for me, it would enable backup calls over a secondary sim card's data, which would allow text and calls overseas without the usual extortionate charges. Oddly enough, I believe that toggle is enabled for my carrier... but only on iOS.
- walterbell 1y ago
  > that toggle is enabled for my carrier... but only on iOS WiFi calling with SIM1 number via SIM2 data has always worked on iOS, so I was surprised when it didn't work on Pixel.
  - pxeboot 1y ago
    This does work on Pixel's, but Google allowed carriers to block it, which at least one major US carrier does.
    - rangestransform 1y ago
      It would be great if google could dick swing on carriers with the same might as Apple
  - mananaysiempre 1y ago
    This is the “Backup calling” toggle in Pixel IMS, and carriers are fond of blocking that function. (TIL: Vo“WiFi” over wired Ethernet over USB doesn’t work on AOSP or Pixel and never did, for no apparent reason except noöne caring to make it work.)
  - amluto 1y ago
    The part that does not work on iOS is putting SIM2 into airplane mode so that it can do VoWiFi without connecting to the network. That would reduce power consumption and avoid utterly obnoxious behavior on the part of some carriers (cough, Visible).
zb3 1y ago
Oh what a terrible vulnerability.. good to know it's patched, I feel much more secure now, thanks Google!
bitpush 1y ago
If Google had not patched this, it would have violated local regulations right? In other words, they are trying to be compliant right? What do people want - a company to openly violate known local laws?
- josephcsible 1y ago
  If you did this somewhere it was illegal, wouldn't that be you violating local laws, not Google violating local laws? If it's the former, then Google shouldn't have "fixed" this "vulnerability", because things you own shouldn't enforce laws against you.
  - flowerthoughts 1y ago
    Yes. The argument will be that because it's expensive to police everyone, lawmakers will simply require anyone selling massmarket goods to do the policing instead. If you're making a non-compliant device in your garage for you and your friends, the police might come. If you're trying to sell it broadly, the police will come, regardless of the user. I'm for freedom of choice, but pushing regulations up the manufacturing stack is definitiely more efficient use of my tax money.
- like_any_other 1y ago
  > it would have violated local regulations right? First, "local" where? I don't know of any laws making VoLTE devices illegal (..unless blessed by a phone carrier?). If you know of any, feel free to list them, but know that Google has blocked it for all users, globally, not just in the localities where VoLTE is somehow illegal. Second, I don't want Google enforcing the law - contrary to your framing, it would not be Google violating known local laws, but users that illegally (assuming it is illegal anywhere) enabled VoLTE. Third, it sounds like they're not enforcing the law, but phone carrier bidding. Having private companies backdoor our devices to force the will of other companies on us is way more corporate dystopia than I am comfortable with. If someone steals my bike, I'm not allowed to break into their house to retrieve it. Yet Google can just abuse their backdoor access to my phone and hack me to make some 3rd party corporation happy? Well, supposing VoLTE is legal in my local area, and my phone carrier allows it on my device, so there is neither legal nor contractual problems, and Google has just sabotaged my phone. Am I allowed to then hack into Google, take their root Android signing key or whatever it is they have to subvert ownership rights, and use it to patch my phone and restore the functionality they broke and that I paid for? No? Well, what if I had sold them the SSD on which those signing keys are stored? Then it's okay, right, that's how it works? If I sell you something it's not actually yours if I had the foresight to include a backdoor in it, and as long as I have the thinnest of pretenses, I can abuse that access against your wishes? Because consumer rights and property rights and personal sovereignty all go up in smoke as soon as something contains a CPU.
ycombinatrix 1y ago
How on earth is this a "vulnerability"? It needed adb shell access.
- ronsor 1y ago
  People were exploiting the poor mobile carriers.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  From the article: >To gain these elevated privileges, Pixel IMS uses Shizuku, an open source Android app that lets other apps run processes as the shell user. It's possible for an app to use wireless debugging to debug the phone it's running on to get shell permissions.
  - mananaysiempre 1y ago
    And it still is, for anything except those carrier overrides.
  - ycombinatrix 1y ago
    Only if you allow it. This security patch doesn't affect that at all, so why is that relevant?
- kouteiheika 1y ago
  The same way being allowed to install programs on your own computer is called "jailbreaking".
  - fwn 1y ago
    "Jail", on the other hand, is a great metaphor for a walled garden.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  It allowed anyone with knowledge to use the cell network in ways the operator of the cell network didn't like. This is generally considered a major issue and can attract serious legal repercussions for a radio device maker that doesn't take care to enforce only the allowed uses.
like_any_other 1y ago
> While not documented in the official changelog, Google appears to have quietly patched this particular exploit. So Google and phone carriers conspired to secretly sabotage user devices. Isn't that patch the actual "hack", given that it is undisclosed and against the device owner's wishes? Why are we going along with this deranged pretense that even if you buy something, it still belongs to the manufacturer?
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  Phones, just like cars, are only allowed to be manufactured and sold to the extent that the manufacturer takes reasonable efforts to prevent end-user misuse of the devices they are selling. This is because phones, just like cars, use and can greatly affect shared public infrastructure - the radio spectrum for phones, public roads for cars. As such, it is natural that there are manufacturer enforced restrictions on end user's use of these devices. Whether this particular case is an overreach of this, or whether there is a real risk to the network from allowing this, I'm not sure.
  - like_any_other 1y ago
    I wouldn't mind your servile attitude so much if it wasn't dragging the rest of us down with you. A key part of "may your chains set lightly upon you" was "go home from us".
    - raw_anon_1111 1y ago
      Because the airwaves are a shared service license to the carriers. Like someone posted about Australia, there were laws made that if a phone couldn’t make emergency calls. It can’t be used. There is no monetary reason for Google to forbid a service that could increase its addressable market
      - like_any_other 1y ago
        Stop pretending Google was legally compelled to do this. So far not a single law against VoLTE has been cited.
userbinator 1y ago
The days of GSM/3G were great. All you needed was a quad-band phone, of which plenty were available from numerous far-East companies but many based on the same or similar chipsets, and you'd have connectivity in the whole world. The situation with LTE is far worse, with several dozen different bands and many opportunities to whitelist and effectively do user-agent discrimination. Even if you bought an unlocked device, if it doesn't have the bands in the area you want to use it and those your provider has cells for, you won't get any service. a high-severity privilege escalation vulnerability This is an extremely clear signal of how they think of the user --- as sheep to be corralled and controlled, not as individuals who have control over the devices they bought. The "security" propaganda they continue to spew has been going on for a while, long enough that increasingly more users are now aware of the truth. To paraphrase the famous words of Linus: Google, fuck you!
- martinald 1y ago
  Why is having so many bands a bad thing? Demand for data is so much higher now you need (ideally) hundreds of MHz of spectrum in dense areas. You need some way to partition that up as you can't just have one huge static block of spectrum per auction. The issue with LTE isn't bands, it's the crappy way they have done VoLTE and also seemingly learnt nothing for VoNR. They should have done something like GET volte.reserved/.well-known/volte-config (each carrier sets up their DNS to resolve volte.reserved to their ims server which provides config data to the phone). It would have given pretty much plug and play compatibility for all devices. Instead the way it works is every phone has a (usually) hopelessly outdated lookup table of carriers and config files. Sort of works for Apple because they can push updates from one central place, but for Android it's a total mess.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - toast0 1y ago
    > Why is having so many bands a bad thing? Demand for data is so much higher now you need (ideally) hundreds of MHz of spectrum in dense areas. You need some way to partition that up as you can't just have one huge static block of spectrum per auction. Because different countries use different sets of bands. That was true for GSM too, but quad band phones were reasonably available. Many phones were at least tri band, so you would at least have half the bands if you imported a 'wrong region' tri-band. But now, you'll have a real tough time with coverage in the US if you import a EU or JP phone.
monster_truck 1y ago
weird amount of cope in here
aussieguy1234 1y ago
In Australia, tons of phones were rendered useless during the "3G switchoff". What was not mentioned about this switchoff is that lots of 4G devices were affected - specifically those that supported VoLTE but were not endorsed by the carriers. I got one of my old phones IMEI's blacklisted just by using the Pixel IMS app. It worked for about 24 hours before the phone got blocked.
- Gigachad 1y ago
  From what I remember the issue was that many models of phone would use 4g/5g for everything but emergency calls, which was done over 3G. So the government made the choice to block those phones from the network entirely rather than leave them seemingly working but unable to make emergency calls.
  - onceler 1y ago
    Pretty much, but the govt didn't do any blocking directly. They just told the carriers, "Hey, you must not allow people to use devices on your networks that are unable to make emergency calls, or we'll apply serious penalties." The carriers then responded, "I notice that there is no requirement that we allow any device that can make emergency calls. So we will only allow devices we also sell (and maybe a few other models, if they're popular enough that we can't get away with not allowing them). And if that means more people than necessary will have to buy new phones, we will happily sell them new phones."
    - kmeisthax 1y ago
      [dead]
    - oneshtein 1y ago
      A phone company cannot test every phone in the world to block or whitelist it.
      - chillfox 1y ago
rs186 1y ago
This phone/carrier nonsense is just stupid. I had lots of trouble with Wi-Fi calling on Android phones: * A phone purchased outside US/unlocked but non mainstream (aka not Samsung/Pixel) phone purchased in the US cannot enable Wi-Fi calling despite having hardware & software support for it, as it's not a supported model * An at&t Samsung phone that is later unlocked cannot enable Wi-Fi calling when using a Visible SIM card. But guess what works? But a Verizon SIM card, insert it without buying/activating a plan, and the phone will ask you whether you want to "switch to" Verizon. After restarting the phone, bloatware from Verizon appears on your phone and suddenly your phone is capable of WiFi calling. (Alternatively, you may be able to connect your phone to a PC and use a tool to fix this.) Not to mention the voicemail mess. On Android, each carrier provides their own voicemail app that is not integrated with the phone app. I don't know who to blame, but all of the nonsense makes me question the decision to use an Android phone.
- toast0 1y ago
  > Not to mention the voicemail mess. On Android, each carrier provides their own voicemail app that is not integrated with the phone app. This doesn't seem to be the case for T-Mobile US prepaid?
  - rs186 1y ago
    I don't have first hand experience with that, but I did find this page: https://www.t-mobile.com/support/plans-features/t-mobile-visual-voicemail-app https://www.t-mobile.com/support/plans-features/t-mobile-vis... which does not mention prepaid/postpaid plans. I definitely could be wrong.
    - toast0 1y ago
      I mean, I guess there's an app, but I just use whatever happens in the normal dialer. In app settings, I have the t-mobile app disabled (since apparently I can't remove it), and I don't see anything voicemail related. I do know that google hides some things, but I'm not setup to look beyond the UI.
  - 1y ago
drnick1 1y ago
I trust this "patch" can be easily reversed in open source versions of Android like Graphene. Just another example of why we need open software on our phones.
- rfoo 1y ago
  Graphene just made VoLTE / NR / VoNR toggle feature built-in to their OS.
Animats 1y ago
Does that work for inbound calls, or just for outbound? How does the voice network find you?
- objectcode 1y ago
  VoLTE is normally for both inbound and outbound. It is not 4GLTE base functionality, but is available if the phone supports it on the carrier and the carrier supports the use of it. An alternative is CSFB, which is about switching to 3G/2G (where calls are base functionality) for the duration of the call, but 3G/2G is not available everywhere. VoNR is like VoLTE(the ability to make and receive calls on 4GLTE), but for 5GNR. The carrier's equipment can find the phone for example by the phone sending tracking area updates/location area updates so it "knows" where the phone can be asked to connect so it can receive an inbound call etc.
SXX 1y ago
Well, I used this so - fuck Google. Android will soon be more locked down than iOS.
pbasista 1y ago
I do not see a rational reason why a mobile carrier should have any say in which connectivity technology is enabled for use with its mobile network on a particular phone model. It should work based on standards, mobile carrier's capabilities and phone's capabilities. If a phone supports capability X, such as VoLTE, then it should just work with all mobile carriers that support that capability. No conditions. As an imperfect analogy, consider a road, representing a mobile network. This road has some capabilities, such as speed limit. There are cars driving on this road, representing mobile phones. And then consider that a road management company, representing the carrier, would impose different speed limits on different cars, depending on whether they are affiliated with the road management company or not. Would that be acceptable in a physical world? If not, we should not accept anything similar in a digital world either.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  It had been a thing since mobile phones existed. Pre-paid cards that required paying for unlocking the phone firmware, eventually forbidden on EU countries. Vodafone famously had their own firmware on Nokia N95 in Germany that disabled tethering,.... It starts by regular people being trained to accept that lack of quality and restrictions are normal in digital world.
  - mananaysiempre 1y ago
    Depends on how the rollout of mobile networking historically went in a particular country. (Mostly, from what I can see, if it was the entrenched landline monopolists from the start or if they had to outcompete a few upstarts first.) In some places (Russia, Ukraine) you have to explain to people what a carrier-locked phone even is, and they get (understandably) appalled at the concept. Others (Turkey) have went as far as to have infra to IMEI-block you after you spend too much time in the country until you pay up.
    - SXX 1y ago
      Turkey situation is different. IMEI block is here to collect exorbitant taxes. This have nothing to do with carriers.
Havoc 1y ago
And this is why I'm mistrustful of Google's "open source" ventures. It's all very OSS until shit gets real and there is pressure from the supposed sponsor See also chromium and MV3
upofadown 1y ago
One workaround is to just do pure VOIP. Then you can get a data only plan. Gotta watch out for 911 access though. Yeah, what happens when you call 911 in an environment with no 3G/2G and your carrier doesn't like your VoLTE? Is there a public safety issue embedded in all this?
- jojobas 1y ago
  Australia bans phones not capable of 4G 000, except for roaming. Tons of phones support VoLTE, but not emergency VoLTE for some reason.
mananaysiempre 1y ago
Another article that also includes an explanation of the current state of the hack (workaround known, patch[1] in development); of GrapheneOS (“security patch” pulled in, but official VoLTE/VoNR/VoWiFi override toggles introduced[2] in device settings as a replacement); and of other phones (coming to all in-support Android phones near you, sometime before December depending on the quality of said support): https://piunikaweb.com/2025/10/10/october-2025-pixel-update-volte-vowifi-pixel-ims-hacks-workaround/ https://piunikaweb.com/2025/10/10/october-2025-pixel-update-... [1]: https://github.com/kyujin-cho/pixel-volte-patch/pull/387 https://github.com/kyujin-cho/pixel-volte-patch/pull/387 [2] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/956 https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/956
ThePowerOfFuet 1y ago
Works great on GrapheneOS as of about a week ago. https://grapheneos.org/releases#2025100300 https://grapheneos.org/releases#2025100300
johnea 1y ago
This, along with the upcoming requirement for android dev registration, are indicators that the time has never been more ripe for migration to a linux phone. My current favorite: https://furilabs.com/ https://furilabs.com/ Yes, it runs a SoC vendor kernel, but please, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It also runs android in a container, allowing execution of apps that are only available in android, and the ability to shut down the android VM otherwise. The HN community is probably one of the most equipped to make this transition, so please seriously consider letting go of goggle...
hackforme 1y ago
[flagged]
karteum 1y ago
Not entirely sure, but I heard that the "Pixel 911 bug" (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37714579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37714579) could be related to an IMS bug. Since operators are liable with regards to safety calls, maybe it explains why they would only allow tested devices to use IMS...

215 points by josephcsible 1y ago

I'm sure they had to do this based on carrier pressure, but it would be great if Google would just put more resources into getting carrier support/certification so their flagship devices will work more places.

vitorgrs 1y ago
And... Sell in more countries as well.

secondcoming 1y ago

> Many carriers only permit VoLTE and VoWiFi on devices they sell or have officially tested. Does this happen even if you are using a carrier's SIM card; it's just because you didn't buy the hardware from them? It's not just an IMEI-level block so data still works?

nagisa 1y ago
No, this is not really tied to whom you purchased the Pixel from. But it is tied to which carriers would sell you a Pixel at all. Meaning they have some sort of an agreement with Google and Google added configuration files whitelisting these features for the carrier in question. (At least for many EU based carriers.)
numpad0 1y ago
VoLTE was an afterthought and carriers don't trust untested vanilla implementations. So they only allow known-good phones.
- cortesoft 1y ago
  Ok, but why block VoWiFi?
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    That still uses their infrastructure at some point, as you are still using your carrier's phone number when you make a VoWiFi call.
    - notpushkin 1y ago
      Yeah, but what’s the problem they’re trying to avoid? Bad SIP implementation not working with their servers? Just text the user: “Hey, you’re using an unsupported VoWiFi stack, if it breaks – that’s on you.”
      - numpad0 1y ago
        "That's on you" is not something that works at cellular scale. You're going to end up fighting some mafia scheme microcosm forming around that little thing.
      - tsimionescu 1y ago
        I don't know, and I haven't seen any explanation either, malicious or otherwise.
  - mananaysiempre 1y ago
    From what (little) I understand, VoLTE and VoWiFi are quite similar under the hood—VoLTE is more or less SIP, and VoWiFi is that same SIP over IPsec. You see how this would be an interoperability nightmare (not that I’m excusing the telecom people for getting us into this mess). Furthermore, some carriers get testy about you avoiding roaming charges by using VoWiFi (while others actually encourage it).

Namidairo 1y ago

> that let Pixel users enable VoLTE anywhere It did a great deal more than that. It also allowed the toggling of VoNR, which apparently affected the fallback behavior of some people's services. (Ie. It would fall back to LTE and not roam back to 5G data unless nudged manually) However for me, it would enable backup calls over a secondary sim card's data, which would allow text and calls overseas without the usual extortionate charges. Oddly enough, I believe that toggle is enabled for my carrier... but only on iOS.

walterbell 1y ago
> that toggle is enabled for my carrier... but only on iOS WiFi calling with SIM1 number via SIM2 data has always worked on iOS, so I was surprised when it didn't work on Pixel.
- pxeboot 1y ago
  This does work on Pixel's, but Google allowed carriers to block it, which at least one major US carrier does.
  - rangestransform 1y ago
    It would be great if google could dick swing on carriers with the same might as Apple
- mananaysiempre 1y ago
  This is the “Backup calling” toggle in Pixel IMS, and carriers are fond of blocking that function. (TIL: Vo“WiFi” over wired Ethernet over USB doesn’t work on AOSP or Pixel and never did, for no apparent reason except noöne caring to make it work.)
- amluto 1y ago
  The part that does not work on iOS is putting SIM2 into airplane mode so that it can do VoWiFi without connecting to the network. That would reduce power consumption and avoid utterly obnoxious behavior on the part of some carriers (cough, Visible).

zb3 1y ago

Oh what a terrible vulnerability.. good to know it's patched, I feel much more secure now, thanks Google!

bitpush 1y ago

If Google had not patched this, it would have violated local regulations right? In other words, they are trying to be compliant right? What do people want - a company to openly violate known local laws?

josephcsible 1y ago
If you did this somewhere it was illegal, wouldn't that be you violating local laws, not Google violating local laws? If it's the former, then Google shouldn't have "fixed" this "vulnerability", because things you own shouldn't enforce laws against you.
- flowerthoughts 1y ago
  Yes. The argument will be that because it's expensive to police everyone, lawmakers will simply require anyone selling massmarket goods to do the policing instead. If you're making a non-compliant device in your garage for you and your friends, the police might come. If you're trying to sell it broadly, the police will come, regardless of the user. I'm for freedom of choice, but pushing regulations up the manufacturing stack is definitiely more efficient use of my tax money.
like_any_other 1y ago
> it would have violated local regulations right? First, "local" where? I don't know of any laws making VoLTE devices illegal (..unless blessed by a phone carrier?). If you know of any, feel free to list them, but know that Google has blocked it for all users, globally, not just in the localities where VoLTE is somehow illegal. Second, I don't want Google enforcing the law - contrary to your framing, it would not be Google violating known local laws, but users that illegally (assuming it is illegal anywhere) enabled VoLTE. Third, it sounds like they're not enforcing the law, but phone carrier bidding. Having private companies backdoor our devices to force the will of other companies on us is way more corporate dystopia than I am comfortable with. If someone steals my bike, I'm not allowed to break into their house to retrieve it. Yet Google can just abuse their backdoor access to my phone and hack me to make some 3rd party corporation happy? Well, supposing VoLTE is legal in my local area, and my phone carrier allows it on my device, so there is neither legal nor contractual problems, and Google has just sabotaged my phone. Am I allowed to then hack into Google, take their root Android signing key or whatever it is they have to subvert ownership rights, and use it to patch my phone and restore the functionality they broke and that I paid for? No? Well, what if I had sold them the SSD on which those signing keys are stored? Then it's okay, right, that's how it works? If I sell you something it's not actually yours if I had the foresight to include a backdoor in it, and as long as I have the thinnest of pretenses, I can abuse that access against your wishes? Because consumer rights and property rights and personal sovereignty all go up in smoke as soon as something contains a CPU.

ycombinatrix 1y ago

How on earth is this a "vulnerability"? It needed adb shell access.

ronsor 1y ago
People were exploiting the poor mobile carriers.
charcircuit 1y ago
From the article: >To gain these elevated privileges, Pixel IMS uses Shizuku, an open source Android app that lets other apps run processes as the shell user. It's possible for an app to use wireless debugging to debug the phone it's running on to get shell permissions.
- mananaysiempre 1y ago
  And it still is, for anything except those carrier overrides.
- ycombinatrix 1y ago
  Only if you allow it. This security patch doesn't affect that at all, so why is that relevant?
kouteiheika 1y ago
The same way being allowed to install programs on your own computer is called "jailbreaking".
- fwn 1y ago
  "Jail", on the other hand, is a great metaphor for a walled garden.
tsimionescu 1y ago
It allowed anyone with knowledge to use the cell network in ways the operator of the cell network didn't like. This is generally considered a major issue and can attract serious legal repercussions for a radio device maker that doesn't take care to enforce only the allowed uses.

like_any_other 1y ago

> While not documented in the official changelog, Google appears to have quietly patched this particular exploit. So Google and phone carriers conspired to secretly sabotage user devices. Isn't that patch the actual "hack", given that it is undisclosed and against the device owner's wishes? Why are we going along with this deranged pretense that even if you buy something, it still belongs to the manufacturer?

tsimionescu 1y ago
Phones, just like cars, are only allowed to be manufactured and sold to the extent that the manufacturer takes reasonable efforts to prevent end-user misuse of the devices they are selling. This is because phones, just like cars, use and can greatly affect shared public infrastructure - the radio spectrum for phones, public roads for cars. As such, it is natural that there are manufacturer enforced restrictions on end user's use of these devices. Whether this particular case is an overreach of this, or whether there is a real risk to the network from allowing this, I'm not sure.
- like_any_other 1y ago
  I wouldn't mind your servile attitude so much if it wasn't dragging the rest of us down with you. A key part of "may your chains set lightly upon you" was "go home from us".
  - raw_anon_1111 1y ago
    Because the airwaves are a shared service license to the carriers. Like someone posted about Australia, there were laws made that if a phone couldn’t make emergency calls. It can’t be used. There is no monetary reason for Google to forbid a service that could increase its addressable market
    - like_any_other 1y ago
      Stop pretending Google was legally compelled to do this. So far not a single law against VoLTE has been cited.

userbinator 1y ago

The days of GSM/3G were great. All you needed was a quad-band phone, of which plenty were available from numerous far-East companies but many based on the same or similar chipsets, and you'd have connectivity in the whole world. The situation with LTE is far worse, with several dozen different bands and many opportunities to whitelist and effectively do user-agent discrimination. Even if you bought an unlocked device, if it doesn't have the bands in the area you want to use it and those your provider has cells for, you won't get any service. a high-severity privilege escalation vulnerability This is an extremely clear signal of how they think of the user --- as sheep to be corralled and controlled, not as individuals who have control over the devices they bought. The "security" propaganda they continue to spew has been going on for a while, long enough that increasingly more users are now aware of the truth. To paraphrase the famous words of Linus: Google, fuck you!

martinald 1y ago
Why is having so many bands a bad thing? Demand for data is so much higher now you need (ideally) hundreds of MHz of spectrum in dense areas. You need some way to partition that up as you can't just have one huge static block of spectrum per auction. The issue with LTE isn't bands, it's the crappy way they have done VoLTE and also seemingly learnt nothing for VoNR. They should have done something like GET volte.reserved/.well-known/volte-config (each carrier sets up their DNS to resolve volte.reserved to their ims server which provides config data to the phone). It would have given pretty much plug and play compatibility for all devices. Instead the way it works is every phone has a (usually) hopelessly outdated lookup table of carriers and config files. Sort of works for Apple because they can push updates from one central place, but for Android it's a total mess.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- toast0 1y ago
  > Why is having so many bands a bad thing? Demand for data is so much higher now you need (ideally) hundreds of MHz of spectrum in dense areas. You need some way to partition that up as you can't just have one huge static block of spectrum per auction. Because different countries use different sets of bands. That was true for GSM too, but quad band phones were reasonably available. Many phones were at least tri band, so you would at least have half the bands if you imported a 'wrong region' tri-band. But now, you'll have a real tough time with coverage in the US if you import a EU or JP phone.

monster_truck 1y ago

weird amount of cope in here

aussieguy1234 1y ago

In Australia, tons of phones were rendered useless during the "3G switchoff". What was not mentioned about this switchoff is that lots of 4G devices were affected - specifically those that supported VoLTE but were not endorsed by the carriers. I got one of my old phones IMEI's blacklisted just by using the Pixel IMS app. It worked for about 24 hours before the phone got blocked.

Gigachad 1y ago
From what I remember the issue was that many models of phone would use 4g/5g for everything but emergency calls, which was done over 3G. So the government made the choice to block those phones from the network entirely rather than leave them seemingly working but unable to make emergency calls.
- onceler 1y ago
  Pretty much, but the govt didn't do any blocking directly. They just told the carriers, "Hey, you must not allow people to use devices on your networks that are unable to make emergency calls, or we'll apply serious penalties." The carriers then responded, "I notice that there is no requirement that we allow any device that can make emergency calls. So we will only allow devices we also sell (and maybe a few other models, if they're popular enough that we can't get away with not allowing them). And if that means more people than necessary will have to buy new phones, we will happily sell them new phones."
  - kmeisthax 1y ago
    [dead]
  - oneshtein 1y ago
    A phone company cannot test every phone in the world to block or whitelist it.
    - chillfox 1y ago

rs186 1y ago

This phone/carrier nonsense is just stupid. I had lots of trouble with Wi-Fi calling on Android phones: * A phone purchased outside US/unlocked but non mainstream (aka not Samsung/Pixel) phone purchased in the US cannot enable Wi-Fi calling despite having hardware & software support for it, as it's not a supported model * An at&t Samsung phone that is later unlocked cannot enable Wi-Fi calling when using a Visible SIM card. But guess what works? But a Verizon SIM card, insert it without buying/activating a plan, and the phone will ask you whether you want to "switch to" Verizon. After restarting the phone, bloatware from Verizon appears on your phone and suddenly your phone is capable of WiFi calling. (Alternatively, you may be able to connect your phone to a PC and use a tool to fix this.) Not to mention the voicemail mess. On Android, each carrier provides their own voicemail app that is not integrated with the phone app. I don't know who to blame, but all of the nonsense makes me question the decision to use an Android phone.

toast0 1y ago
> Not to mention the voicemail mess. On Android, each carrier provides their own voicemail app that is not integrated with the phone app. This doesn't seem to be the case for T-Mobile US prepaid?
- rs186 1y ago
  I don't have first hand experience with that, but I did find this page: https://www.t-mobile.com/support/plans-features/t-mobile-visual-voicemail-app https://www.t-mobile.com/support/plans-features/t-mobile-vis... which does not mention prepaid/postpaid plans. I definitely could be wrong.
  - toast0 1y ago
    I mean, I guess there's an app, but I just use whatever happens in the normal dialer. In app settings, I have the t-mobile app disabled (since apparently I can't remove it), and I don't see anything voicemail related. I do know that google hides some things, but I'm not setup to look beyond the UI.
- 1y ago

drnick1 1y ago

I trust this "patch" can be easily reversed in open source versions of Android like Graphene. Just another example of why we need open software on our phones.

rfoo 1y ago
Graphene just made VoLTE / NR / VoNR toggle feature built-in to their OS.

Animats 1y ago

Does that work for inbound calls, or just for outbound? How does the voice network find you?

objectcode 1y ago
VoLTE is normally for both inbound and outbound. It is not 4GLTE base functionality, but is available if the phone supports it on the carrier and the carrier supports the use of it. An alternative is CSFB, which is about switching to 3G/2G (where calls are base functionality) for the duration of the call, but 3G/2G is not available everywhere. VoNR is like VoLTE(the ability to make and receive calls on 4GLTE), but for 5GNR. The carrier's equipment can find the phone for example by the phone sending tracking area updates/location area updates so it "knows" where the phone can be asked to connect so it can receive an inbound call etc.

SXX 1y ago

Well, I used this so - fuck Google. Android will soon be more locked down than iOS.

pbasista 1y ago

I do not see a rational reason why a mobile carrier should have any say in which connectivity technology is enabled for use with its mobile network on a particular phone model. It should work based on standards, mobile carrier's capabilities and phone's capabilities. If a phone supports capability X, such as VoLTE, then it should just work with all mobile carriers that support that capability. No conditions. As an imperfect analogy, consider a road, representing a mobile network. This road has some capabilities, such as speed limit. There are cars driving on this road, representing mobile phones. And then consider that a road management company, representing the carrier, would impose different speed limits on different cars, depending on whether they are affiliated with the road management company or not. Would that be acceptable in a physical world? If not, we should not accept anything similar in a digital world either.

pjmlp 1y ago
It had been a thing since mobile phones existed. Pre-paid cards that required paying for unlocking the phone firmware, eventually forbidden on EU countries. Vodafone famously had their own firmware on Nokia N95 in Germany that disabled tethering,.... It starts by regular people being trained to accept that lack of quality and restrictions are normal in digital world.
- mananaysiempre 1y ago
  Depends on how the rollout of mobile networking historically went in a particular country. (Mostly, from what I can see, if it was the entrenched landline monopolists from the start or if they had to outcompete a few upstarts first.) In some places (Russia, Ukraine) you have to explain to people what a carrier-locked phone even is, and they get (understandably) appalled at the concept. Others (Turkey) have went as far as to have infra to IMEI-block you after you spend too much time in the country until you pay up.
  - SXX 1y ago
    Turkey situation is different. IMEI block is here to collect exorbitant taxes. This have nothing to do with carriers.

Havoc 1y ago

And this is why I'm mistrustful of Google's "open source" ventures. It's all very OSS until shit gets real and there is pressure from the supposed sponsor See also chromium and MV3

upofadown 1y ago

One workaround is to just do pure VOIP. Then you can get a data only plan. Gotta watch out for 911 access though. Yeah, what happens when you call 911 in an environment with no 3G/2G and your carrier doesn't like your VoLTE? Is there a public safety issue embedded in all this?

jojobas 1y ago
Australia bans phones not capable of 4G 000, except for roaming. Tons of phones support VoLTE, but not emergency VoLTE for some reason.

mananaysiempre 1y ago

Another article that also includes an explanation of the current state of the hack (workaround known, patch[1] in development); of GrapheneOS (“security patch” pulled in, but official VoLTE/VoNR/VoWiFi override toggles introduced[2] in device settings as a replacement); and of other phones (coming to all in-support Android phones near you, sometime before December depending on the quality of said support): https://piunikaweb.com/2025/10/10/october-2025-pixel-update-volte-vowifi-pixel-ims-hacks-workaround/ https://piunikaweb.com/2025/10/10/october-2025-pixel-update-... [1]: https://github.com/kyujin-cho/pixel-volte-patch/pull/387 https://github.com/kyujin-cho/pixel-volte-patch/pull/387 [2] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/956 https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/956

ThePowerOfFuet 1y ago

Works great on GrapheneOS as of about a week ago. https://grapheneos.org/releases#2025100300 https://grapheneos.org/releases#2025100300

johnea 1y ago

This, along with the upcoming requirement for android dev registration, are indicators that the time has never been more ripe for migration to a linux phone. My current favorite: https://furilabs.com/ https://furilabs.com/ Yes, it runs a SoC vendor kernel, but please, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It also runs android in a container, allowing execution of apps that are only available in android, and the ability to shut down the android VM otherwise. The HN community is probably one of the most equipped to make this transition, so please seriously consider letting go of goggle...

hackforme 1y ago

[flagged]

karteum 1y ago

Not entirely sure, but I heard that the "Pixel 911 bug" (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37714579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37714579) could be related to an IMS bug. Since operators are liable with regards to safety calls, maybe it explains why they would only allow tested devices to use IMS...