Marius announced that VoLTE is now working satisfactorily for both Mediatek and Qualcomm. The modifications are already in the image for both Focal and Noble. With that said in order to use them the porter for each device must do the work on that and for Qualcomm the only device we have at the moment is the Fairphone 5. On the Mediatek side, Volla from 22 up are functional. Marius and Alfred have been running it as a daily driver for awhile and have found no major problems.

This is not just voice it is also SMS over VoLTE. AppLee reported some issues with MMS but Marius was surprised that MMS would work at all because it is a different type of protocol. Alfred attempted to test that out live but like most live attempts it didn’t work. Alfred also placed a call though and that did work.

In yet more big news, Marius has now succeeded in getting an eSIM to work. At the moment it functions only in command line but he is working on a UI for it. The fix used the Lpac library. A big shout out to the developers of that because it contains resources which we have used for lots of different things.

Marius confirmed to a questioner that both VoLTE and eSIM will have entries in Settings.

Halium 12 devices upgrade

Alagiralagir had a couple of questions. The first was to ask why all devices can’t be upgraded to Halium 12 so that they can take advantage of VoLTE? Alfred is the porter of the Pixel 3a but he expressed his view that the device has outlived its usefulness. It runs on Halium 9. It is not worth the effort of taking it further and there is not even a guarantee that Halium 12 would unlock VoLTE. There are times when the only way forward is to get a more modern phone and this is one of those times.

The Pixel 3a is not supported in Austria anymore, even if it is running the original Android. Time to let it go.

If we are going to make more use of Mastodon and Matrix we need volunteers to take care of that.