Google advises Android users to be careful of Microsoft Teams if they want to call 911 A bizarre bug prevented a woman from calling 911 on her Pixel smartphone when she thought her grandma was having a stroke. She told El Reg that on 26th November, after she dialed the number using her phone, she waited five minutes only to realize her call wasn’t going through. Luckily, there was a landline telephone at hand, …
My mother still has a phone with a dial on it (which I presume is where the term dialling came from).
IIRC, 999 was chosen as you could turn the dial to the end (9) without needing to see what you were doing. It's an example of a simple but effective solution from a time when people thought about how users of a system might be impacted.
IIRC, 999 was chosen as you could turn the dial to the end (9) without needing to see what you were doing.
Nearly right! If you did that you'd dial 000 ... but 999 was chosen because the 9 hole in the dial was easy to find in the dark/smoke in an emergency; not as easy as the 0 hole, maybe, but easy enough.
Dialling even a single 0 would have got though to the operator (eventually) in those days.
111 fun fact.
Now here's a thing. In New Zealand the emergency number is, in fact, 111.
I was told that this came about because when NZ went to switch to "dial" phones as opposed to operator gets your number, they decided that as it was a big investment, they would follow the international standard, hence all the dial phones were reversed with 0 being the first position, as normal but then going 1-9 around the dial.
So I was informed, all the other countries decided to ignore the supposed "international" standard and thus you guys are wrong. LOL.
This of course, meant that when tapping out the number to avoid payment in a phone box, one had to tap out the number subtracted from 10, so for, say, 483, you would tap 6, 2, and 7 times to get the correct number of pulses. Worked wonders for your arithmetic skills.
When 111 was brought in here, people, having watched British TV programs where 999 was used as an emergency number, they asked of NZ Post Office which ran the telephone system at the time, why 111, as 999 was obviously easier.
Refer above to the explanation why 999 was chosen as opposed to 000 or 111. Also not helped by the fact that in their wisdom, NZ Post decided that area codes would only be a single digit, and chose 9 as the access to the Auckland region numbers. A preceding 0 was used to access "long distance" numbers of other areas. e.g. 07, 04 etc.
I haven't tried it, but I believe that to cater for tourists panicking in an emergency and automatically "dialling" their own country's number, our the system will now also recognise 999, 911 and presumably any other emergency number used around the world.
If anyone thinks they know differently, please comment (politely) as I was told this by someone working in the communications area of a large NZ company in the 1970s.
No, zero is the last hole on the dial (=10 pulses), so you have to use 2 fingers to locate the nine in the dark, but you can obviously do that repeatedly fairly easily
111 was obvious but ruled out because in the days of bare overhead wires they could touch or earth and generate false alarms if they touched 3 times within the right timeframe.
999 was picked in the UK because it was relatively unallocated, so fairly easy to free up. 911 in the US would probably be because x11 numbers were 'services'
Some of the satellite telephone exchanges in the UK used "9" as a local code prefix to route calls to the main exchange, so an upshot of this was that you only needed to dial "99" from the main exchange.
Which was worth knowing if you were pranking your friends by pretending to dial 999 and assumed the call wouldn't go through until you dialled the last 9 :-)
Savvy users realised you could often dial long-distance calls at local rates by using a string of local prefixes to hop around adjacent exchanges. IIRC BT fixed this by printing something like "only codes published in this book may be used" in the local dialling codes directory, and was eventually swept away by insisting on using the full STD code rather than the short local codes.
(No, not that sort of STD. As someone else said, you can't catch an STD from a telephone, but you could from a telephonist :-)
...which I presume is where the term dialling came from...
Boy, does that make me feel old. When I first became aware of phones, they ALL had dials - and so, of course, you dialled a number. In those days, of course, that was the modern way of doing things. Previous to that, you picked up the phone and asked the operator to be put through to the person to whom you wanted to speak.
Push button phones were in the future (first ones were late sixties, I think), and seemed very futuristic. In the early eighties, when I had a push-button trimfone I felt very cool and trendy :)
"Previous to that, you picked up the phone, cranked a handle and asked the operator to be put through"
There, fixed it for you
Yes. I used those kinds of phones (and a few years later assisted in replacing those ~80 year old party lines hosting up to 15 subscribers/circuit with TDMA radio linked circuits back to NEAX61M switches)
" ~80 year old party lines hosting up to 15 subscribers/circuit"
Craven, stuck in Northmoor and getting increasingly desperate, with an *almost* 80 year old phone at the other end of the line. The duty officer, not expecting th atphone to ring, eventually picks it up and hears Craven scream: "GET ME PENDLETON!"
(surely that must be on the Interweb somewhere, but I'm damned if I can find it)
Now try doing that kind of the thing on your Nokia 6150. Okay there'd probably still be life in the battery after 20-40 years, but one or two other things might have been improved in an incompatible way, perhaps including GSM-style SIM-free calling to emergency numbers.
IT connection: magically teleporting from the Barbican to the ex-Systime offices in Leeds?
https://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/37592479
https://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/37596015
"It's a long time since I heard the Arlington described as ex-Systime."
I was never directly involved with Systime but at some point did visit HQ (as a potential customer). So when I saw it on EoD it looked strangely familiar, and somehow it was duly identified as Systime HQ. And if I remember rightly for a while it was First Direct HQ? Lots of other occupants too, further reading at
https://www.whiteroseofficepark.co.uk/2018/01/15/30-years-white-rose-park-office-park/
I never knew it as Arlington anything, and even if I had, there were Arlingtons everywhere, whereas there was only one "famous" Systime building.
At least, that's the way I remember it now.
While I'm passing, hat tip too to Bird of Prey:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_of_Prey_(TV_serial)
https://www.markpack.org.uk/107183/bird-prey-computer-crime-drama-thats-still-great-fun-watch/
You feel old? My first job when I was in college was running a PBX (private branch exchange, if anyone cares to know) for a hotel. Folks called and I, as operator, greeted them and literally connected the lines between the switchboard and the desired room.
One would have thought that the core 'phone' processes of Android (particularly on a Pixel, where Google has total control) would be completely locked down from other apps/processes to prevent, well, things like this happening. Would be interesting to read the details of the bug(s).
Well, given that the Teams app on my OpenSuse computer swaps the keyboard layout from UK to US (e.g. shift-2 is @, rather than "), a change which is system-wide (i.e. it doesn't just affect Teams) but doesn't show up in system settings (which still shows UK), and isn't reverted until I (having quit Teams) use the system settings to swap to another keyboard layout and then back to UK, quite frankly, nothing would surprise me.
You might almost expect a computer OS to have such issues with something as trivial as keyboard layout but you are absolutely correct that making calls is something that should be sacrosanct on a phone. Wild speculation, but if Teams has "making and receiving calls" permission (I don't use Teams on Android - I've no idea if it needs this permission), perhaps it interposes itself in the call chain, even when not in-use? If so, it does rather beg the question, "why?"
M.
she did note that she was able to reach her other contacts, and that it was ONLY the 911 number that she had the issue with. I wonder if she would have had issues with the other *11 numbers that in use in North America, and that the issue is the length of the number being only 3 digits, rather than the usual 7, 10 or 11.
"Teams app on my OpenSuse computer swaps the keyboard layout from UK to US"
Doesn't happen on my machine (Arch). I'm running this version: aur/teams-insiders 1.4.00.26453-1
I've never seen the problem you have ever and I've been using this bloody thing for quite a while now (at least two years).
I'd look elsewhere unless other OpenSuSE users are reporting the same snag in your forums.
I'm fairly new to Teams, having only had it foisted on me ooh, let's think, about 18 months ago. I only fire it up on OpenSuse when I absolutely have to but I'm finding it a pain on Windows in the office too. Just this morning I was asked to reply to a discussion thread - one particular colleague prefers to use these - and duly read the thread, composed and posted a reply, only to find that as soon as I'd posted it four additional messages showed up, posted over the last two days, which would have been relevant to my reply.
Later, making another reply, I scrolled up the list to check a fact, only to find my half-written reply had disappeared when I scrolled back down. So I started again, posted the reply, went to check something else, and when I came back my previous half-written reply presented itself in an edit box, ready for me to continue. I mean, why??????
Oh, and that ignores the issues faced by my wife, who has to use Teams both for her job and for her professional body and finds that it saves an awful lot of grief if she uses separate devices for each.
M.
I think that summarises as "software is crap", and I'd agree with that.
There is a fascinating talk here which makes a compelling case that we are in the middle of a collapse of civilisation, caused by software becoming unmanageably complex, and our unquestioning acceptance of it being crap. Does it seem perfectly normal to you that things these days have to be regularly restarted to make them work? Should it?
This is from the viewpoint of a games developer, so we're not exactly talking safety-critical systems here, but it's definitely worth a watch.
"the Teams app on my OpenSuse computer swaps the keyboard layout from UK to US"
Sounds about right. At least here in the US, Windows 10 and 11 assumes that you live in the same timezone that Microsoft is in. Windows 7 would ask you what timezone you lived in. Now everyone lives in the Pacific timezone. Unless you buy a Dell computer, then everyone lives in the Central timezone.
The point being is that it seems Microsoft assumes everyone is like them. The programmers live in Pacific time, so do you. The programmers use a US keyboard layout, so do you. The programmers like that abomination of a start menu, so do you. Do you see the point?
Yeah, the settings are all there but they seem to revert at random times, though as I only use W10 at work I suppose it might be something IT have done rather than a problem with W10 itself. I have the keyboard set to "CY" (Cymraeg) at work because that (in theory) allows easier access to constructors for accented characters. It's stuck for several months now, but it used to swap back to "EN" at least a couple of times a month. Half the time it doesn't work as expected though, and it irks that when it does the key combinations aren't the same as I'm used to elsewhere - I've got quite used to typing altgr-5 for ½ at home, but I'm blowed if I can find an easy combination on W10; I end up typing alt-keypad-0-1-8-9.
M.
"swaps the keyboard layout from UK to US"
Take a look at what ibus might be doing.
Zoom does this, at least on Devuan & Debian. The actual culprit is ibus which gets installed because the Zoom deb lists it as a dependency. There's a workaround which involves unpacking the deb, editing out the dependency and repackaging. Whether that would work with a Teams install is a different matter.
Interesting - I'll have to have a look. I've not had a similar problem with Zoom, which is also on that computer, but I think that as I installed Teams as a one-off package and the system isn't looking for updates (because the MS servers had broken keys and every hour when the system checked I'd get a pop up telling me that, so I stopped auto checking) I might get away with uninstalling iBus if it genuinely isn't required elsewhere.
No, of course I haven't checked the forums :-) I use the Teams app so rarely on that machine that it's not worth wasting too much time on. I only have the app installed because I can't do Teams video calls in Firefox, though all the other functions work fine. On top of that, although Teams is supposedly the bees knees at work, probably half the video calls I get invited to are on Zoom anyway!
M.
and openness that Android proponents are always saying iPhone lacks, the ability to override the system default dialer goes along with it. Its just that there are consequences when the apps doing the overriding don't handle someone dialing '911' properly.
Part of the configurability touted for Android is replacing all its functionality, including the default texting app and the default calling app while it is not possible to change those on an iPhone.
Sure, they could be smarter about what they allow to be replaced, but it turns out they weren't. The correct fix here isn't "Microsoft submits a patch" it is that AND "Google announces the next version of Android will not permit a third party app to replace the default dialer".
"One would have thought that the core 'phone' processes of Android ... would be completely locked down"
One might, but my husband has an Android, and I just got off a call where he ended up using his desk landline to actually speak to me. Apparently, the phone gets interference from his work WiFi network, which keeps trying to preempt the phone signal, resulting in somewhere between 1 and 3 words getting through before getting whacked, trying to reconnect, getting whacked again. He explained he has to disable all WiFi connections if he wants to use his Android phone as an actual phone.
One of the other things that Google need to investigate is to why the issue has to become a big issue on social media days after the it was filed with them before they respond by asking for a bug report. Should social media really be the only working method for reporting and the triage for a serious failure?
It's simple, really. Stupid, but simple:
Google has a vanishingly small number of employees. Human eyes are not being laid on the overwhelming majority of bug reports. They get parsed by an automated system, and when the number of reports reporting certain key words reach a certain saturation, only then do human eyes look at the problem.
Otherwise, it takes something that's a shock to the normal system. You would think that the keyword "911" or "emergency call" would be an automatic "elevate this ticket to human intervention" priority, but there's assholes out there who absolutely WOULD put "911 Emergency Call! My phone is vibrating at me when it receives a call and I don't like it, FIX THIS NOW!" in a bug ticket.
So something has to shock the normal system and get human eyes on the problem, to get human eyes on the problem. Someone filing a lawsuit and getting the lawyers involved would do it, as does a social media firestorm that eventually gets to one of those Googley employees' own private experience and makes them go "Oh shit, we have a problem here!"
There are two answers to that.
First there's no excuse for not doing things properly. If you want to do things at large scale do them properly and if you can't scale doing them properly at scale then admit that to yourself and work at a scale you can manage.
The second is that Google also makes a big noise about its AI abilities. If they're that good then they can use their AI on sorting the issues. If they're not that good then stop the empty bragging.
Stop empty bragging?! Seriously? This is a tech company - almost all of their income depends on advertisers believing that they have data and know how to use it. The truth is that they have less data than they claim and they don't know how to use it - if they did then you'd get relevant adverts all the time and I rarely do. Mostly I get adverts for the things I've already bought.
They make a lot of money for selling targeted adverts. The actual targeting is things you've already bought, of course. The fact you've bought it already and aren't going to buy it again doesn't affect Google's bottom line because Google have no interest in selling you anything.
Let me repeat that. Google have no interest in selling you anything. Unless, of course, you want to buy advertising.
All they sell is advertising to advertisers.
"Should social media really be the only working method for reporting and the triage for a serious failure?"
No, of course it has to be a social media media post that accidentally somehow becomes trending / viral.
Bug reporting something boring, even though of vital importance? Not in the loop with some big 'influencer'? Sorry, your post, and therefore your problem, does not exist.
... "I'm supposed to trust that a phone will do the main thing is built for, and place the call, and let me speak to the human on the other end."
ROTFL
"“Based on our investigation ... We believe the issue is only present on a small number of devices ... and we are currently only aware of one user ..."
who lived long enough to complain
I think it is perhaps arguable that since the article *introduces* this as (merely) a "bizarre bug", that might well be seen as trivialising or downplaying it; even if the full consequences were evident as (or if) the rest of the article were read. And especially since the headline used the rather low key "Google advises Android users to be careful ..." rather than e.g. something like "do not trust if..."
US targeted cellphones typically have the AM/FM radio disabled (although it is present in hardware). In some recent fires electricity and cell towers were out, making emergency news such as safe escape routes impossible to find out. Someone had the brilliant no-cost idea of requiring US cellphones to have AM/FM enabled. Not a chance. Freeloaders might start listening to the radio instead of purchasing online music subscriptions.
>>No phone boxes nearby - Can't make an emergency on that 'cos it ain't there.
I have a P, in the middle of nowhere, where there is no power at all and has a phone for very occasional/emergency use (installed back in 1934 if that makes any difference).
I wonder what the grand BT solution will be? probably 'oh well sorry to see you go' becasue getting power to the premises is prohibitively expensive.
Attach a warning label saying 'this device needs power' and toss the problem over the fence to the user.
But you'll find out soon as BT transitions to digital voice. So BT retail told me about that, and shipped me a new router. Then my phone went dead, so figured connecting the router had triggered the cutover. But nope, turned out a mouse had chewed my leg off*.
But I digress. It confused me, because I have a nice Openreach NID that comes complete with POTS adapter and battery. Which I discovered Retail isn't using, so the router will need to be on UPS, because spending a few cents to include that in the Hub eats into margins.
*AKA a '1-legged fault'. Which I remembered amusing me as a fresh BT scrub, serving my time at BT's HMP Stone training college.
Off topic, but one thing about POTS shutdown I'm not clear about. Will everyone be expected to use VoIP in the same way we can now, with no change to the IP link?
Or will the ISP use encapsulation and tunnel a virtual connection to us for VoIP use? What I mean is, I'm guessing the isps that are already telcos at the very least will offer VoIP products, will we connect to them over a tunnelled connection, or just the standard IP link?
Thanks for any insights, P.
Yes. Ish.
A few years ago, I designed a wholesale broadband service for a heavily regulated incumbent. Each Ethernet service would have a second VLAN of 64Kbps that had priority. Service could be provided with a NID, or customers could self-provision. Intent was for that VLAN to be used for voice services, but being wholesale and agnostic, it was up to customers if they used it or not.
I think that's also how Openreach does it, but not really looked into BT Retail's plans. The new Hub does have a POTS port in it, but not opened it up yet to dig into it's guts. But it'll do VoIP conversion. BT's letters also mention handsets will be available, presumably SIP phones via WiFi.
Challenge is it's not just BT, just anyone using BT's voice services. So for example an ISP that's used LLU to take over copper lines can do it's own thing. Personally, I think that should include class of service to to potect voice traffic during congestion. But that also risks invoking the 'Net Neutrality holy war. So it may end up following the US model where it took a few deaths before the regulator stomped on cowboy VoIP operators.
But such is politics. So short answer is if you're already using VoIP, nothing should change. The BT switchover really only affects BT' POTS customers, resellers, and some other services like alarm circuits. If you're not using BT, it'll depend on how they implement voice. One tell might be if there's an xDSL filter, which notches out some bandwith for analogue voice, which then gets managed at the headend. If the phone's plugged into the router, then it's doing VoIP already, or an ATA (Analogue Terminal Adapter) might be doing that function.
Then for transport, it depends on ISP, or ISPs. One test is good'ol working from home. If you're on a voice or video call, someone says they're sending a file, and video or voice packets drop, then there's congestion, and/or they're doing QoS wrong. Or if calls are between ISPs, then that's another 'Net neutrality issue, and people will just have to live with best efforts Internet.
You can always rely on good old Microsoft to break anything it touches.
"Microsoft is a cancer that attaches itself in a foistware sense to every competing Operating System, borking everything as it goes." - Me. Just now.
Not content with constantly breaking the desktop, it is now doing the same to its competitors. Why is Google even allowing Microsoft's toxic code onto its OS given how MS are abusing the browser market again. ? I had that "Link to PC" crud forced onto my Android, no way to disable it, no way to remove it. Doesn't work with Manjaro so useless to me anyway.
Microsoft needs shutting down. Their behaviour is outrageous.
It's probably down to how you can register other apps for core services - like FB messenger keeps nagging and trying to take control of SMS messages ("Unified interface for all your messages", totally unrelated to slurping up as much data as we can for advertising...). It's potentially really useful to have an alternative app for making phone calls (possibly with accessibility features for some users), but that application must NEVER interfere with making emergency calls. It should also be crystal clear that it's taking on that role so the user understands what's going on.
Best guess is that the issue is Teams app trying to register as a way to make/receive calls (since you can make calls with Teams) and screwing it up.
"...but that application must NEVER interfere with making emergency calls."
You take a lot of words to make the same point as me. :P
That said, I agree with your diagnosis. And I imagine Google is busy rushing out a fix to prevent this from happening. (Let's hope they do it for all locale specific emergency codes and not just 911.) But the responsibility is Google's.
Um, whose testing process is at fault here, Android or MS? In any case, a test suite that doesn't include checking that emergency calls work in all possible circumstances is not fit for purpose. I dare say several liability lawyers are studying this case night and day looking for the torts.
I suppose the quick fix would be to take your SIM card out? I think that would work in most countries.
On the one hand, that would be an interesting test. On the other, it's 911, and non-emergency calls are frowned on.
But apart from safety of life issues, this bug I think would breach operator licence conditions if a phone can't make emergency calls. That's usually a precondition of most telecomms licences, so the FCC might take an interest.
I am sure a company like Google can afford to setup a 'test 4G network' within their premises with a test 911 number that testers can spam without being frowned upon.
I know we had our own 'Test broadcast network' for testing satellite TV products without real customer devices going titsup in the event of a faulty command being sent.
Yup. I was being somewhat ironic given it'd end up being FCC vs Google, Microsoft, and/or the network supplying the phone. But as you say, potential for some very large fines, and probably some class action attempts.
It'll be interesting to see what happens though, and why a 3 or 4G handset introduced a dependency on Teams rather than the handset's radio. At a guess, I suspect it'll be down to offload attempts. So trying to offload voice calls as data, hence Teams. But if it's going to do that, it should be monitoring call setup close to quickly back off to radio if it fails.
It'll be interesting to see what happens though, and why a 3 or 4G handset introduced a dependency on Teams rather than the handset's radio.
Methinks it's clear that that dependency isn't introduced by the handset -- the problem begins when Teams is installed on the handset.
I would guess that Teams is intercepting phone calls so that it can offer to connect to other Teams users whose phone numbers it knows through Teams rather than by phone, and something about the 911 number is causing it to bork. Maybe Teams just thinks "911" isn't long enough to be a phone number, so it gets ignored?
I note that the problem doesn't manifest if the handset is logged into a Teams account, so maybe Teams implements some kind of shortcode quick-dialling facility that is only active when logged in, and discards all short numbers when it's not?
Bottom line: Teams is trying to do something clever that the phone wasn't designed to do and Microsoft haven't considered the effect on 911 calls and haven't tested their work thoroughly.
I have Teams up and logged in on my phone, but it doesn't have permissions for Phone, Contacts or Location.
Wondering if denying Phone permission is a solution.
Oh well, at least they seem to have fixed the bug where it crashes if you try pasting anything into the chat.
It's possibly semantics, and a bit of a circular firing squad. So customer buys phone and service. There's a legal obligation on one or both to make sure 911 calls work. Rest might get a bit murkier, ie Alphabet's obligation for the OS to work, cerify thats apps are safe. So for whatever reason, if the 911 call is passed to another app, it's probably a very good idea to monitor the call setup and termination.
Users (and regulators) don't care what happens under the hood. Dial 911, get dispatcher asking what service you require. Certainly not 5mins of dead air.
As I understand it, 911/emergency call systems are usually understanding when they receive a test call from a technician setting up a system or something like that, E.G.
"This is not an emergency; I'm Joe Blow from Moe Schmoe Contracting at Some Glow Factory and Casino, setting up a 'dial 777-and-the-CEO's-birthday to call out' internal phone system and testing that emergency numbers bypass the filters and go straight to you."
In some - the best, really - cases, it's required by law that, no matter what other shenanigans a telephone might be set up for, if someone dials 911, they reach the emergency operator, without any intermediary systems or persons involved in the loop.
They won't be happy if you SPAM them, of course, but they'd FAR rather take a few non-emergency calls to confirm that yes, a weird and/or wonky system you're setting up does reach them when someone bangs in 911, than hear about it on the news that somebody was desperately dialing 911 to report that the slot machines had achieved sapience and had banded together with the lathes to rise up against the human overlords and the call wasn't going through because the system required the person making the call to put in a prefix number to get an outside line.
I think they would rather have someone say 'sorry, this is just a test call' than having someone just hang up when they answered. If they have a 'hang-up' that could indicate anything from stupidly butt-dialling to a major incident where the person was no longer able to continue the call, and they would probably have to investigate to find out more.
This is exactly what I used to do when setting up a new phone system, for three reasons:
1. We wanted to be sure 911 calls would actually go through.
2. We wanted to be sure the 911 operator saw the correct location the call was coming from.
3. We wanted to be sure our internal alerting that a 911 call was made worked and notified the right people on prem so they could respond.
But then again I worked for a company where life/safety was taken seriously. YMMV.
I suppose, but might be a tricky thing to do quickly when distracted by an emergency; all that faffing around trying to find the little notch or whatever needed to start levering the back of the phone off, &etc.
Assuming you even remembered or noticed - the article already stated that the caller didn't even notice the call hadn't worked for five minutes!
It's part of the old Bellheads vs Netheads problem, and the slow maturation of the Internet. Which is increasingly being expected to deliver services it was never designed for. Despite some kludges, IP is still fundamentally best efforts. And there's some mindset issues, so-
Bellhead: If this service fails, people will die.
Nethead: If this service fails, customer can claim a 5 second service credit.
Which is pretty much what happened in the early days of OTT VoIP providers. People either couldn't make emergency calls, or couldn't be located and there were deaths. Then regulators stepped in to try and get the mess sorted out.
it really baffles me that anyone (in the world of 2021) would even bother with 'Google support'. But then, perhaps she knew what she was doing, perhaps these days, to get the attention you _must_ follow the dance steps: you contact 'support' / you hear nothing / you open on social media / you might get a twitch of reaction, or a wink (success! - we're already into first tones of the google waltz). Or, perhaps the intro's still building up, as other dancers join you and then, maybe, just maybe, the noise makes the Behemoth wearily open an eyelid...
Obvious, fatal replicable bug on my Chromebox that causes the whole thing to crash on login.
Basically, an error starting the android subsystem kills the whole chrome system.
First occured 2 years ago. I have logs, ideas of what's going wrong, and whilst not a fix a workaround. (Errors starting android should not be fatal)
Posted about it to official forums. Ignored.
Official Chromebook support won't look at it because my box is in "developer mode" (despite me not altering anything and needing it in developer mode to get the friggin' logs.)
"Developer" support is the usual volunteer thing where you are to have no expectation of a response.
In fact, loads of stupid issues make a Chromebox useless as a TV box. If you want a really powerful, hackable TV box with a proper desktop, look elsewhere. My old rooted cheapo Chinese android box works better but really needs an upgrade :-(
I must say that for the first time ever, earlier this year I actually got to speak to a knowledgeable and helpful Google support employee who fixed an incredibly frustrating chicken-and-egg merrygoround problem related to Google Apps/Workspace/whatever they're calling it today.
I admit I was utterly astounded, and this may be the only known instance of it... but it definitely happened.
...only beaten by every version of Windows after 2000.
Either the teams coding team are top-to-bottom 100% A-grade f**kwits, or they're all psychopaths, truly believing that pesky rules are for others.
Maybe both.
If Teams was better written, I'd think it was a virus.
I.
Hate.
Teams.
Problem seems to be that they are aiming to be an all-in-one package but it's just turned out to be a jack of all trades, master of none... I can't even get the thing to open in a window the same size as I left it last night
Many people, like me, don't need all of that and were happy with Skype and a handful of other programs... and a lot less strain on the system ('xxx not responding')
I made the mistake of trying to install the Teams app on Linux once. Utter shit-show of a product and you have to have a MS account just to get on to other people's invites.
Now just use Chromium 'web' mode, still shit but less messing with my computer. MS are so utterly incompetent they can't even support a non-Chrome browser.
All together now! I remove any and all MS apps from my phones as soon as I get them.
My workplace uses Teams and my boss has asked me to put Teams on my phone: I've said hell no! He's stopped asking.
If MS exploded tomorrow, all you would hear from me is a belly laugh like Dr. Cox when he totaled the janitors van.
...which I have had to do, on a few occasions this year, it suspends some of your phone settings (such as do not disturb) for some hours afterwards as it assumes that you really are dealing with an emergency and any incoming call could spell the difference between life and death.
Now that is an example of thoughtful design.
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