Status of Calls and SMS on Librem 5

[weirdnerd]

As I eagerly await my Librem 5, I am evaluating whether I will need an additional device (e.g. iPhone). I will be starting a new job in the fall, and I will need a phone that will reliably place and receive calls and SMS messages. What is the current status? Does the phone reliably receive calls and texts? Does it sometimes silently miss notifications, etc?

If the phone will adequately perform for calls and texts, then I will likely upgrade my order to the Librem 5 USA version to avoid getting a second phone.

P.S. I already anticipate needing multiple batteries to get through the day, but that’s another issue regarding whether the Librem 5 will perform adequately.

[Skalman]

I think currently it works well enough for calls and regular SMS messages but you get trouble when someone tries to send you an MMS, as far as I know that is still silently discarded. I think that is about to get fixed, there has been significant progress on it, but it’s not done yet. See:

State of MMS on Librem 5

@fralb5 TL;DR: I am waiting to hear back from Purism on how to proceed with Chatty integration, and I don’t know the status of mmsd-tng in PureOS. To be clear, I am not a Purism/Pine64/related employee, so I do not set priorities for them. What I can tell you is mmsd-tng is in the pipeline for the Debian repo, it is in Mobian Unstable, and it is in PostmarketOS. I do not know its status for PureOS. I can also tell you that I have a branch for chatty that supports (backend) MMS support, but s…

Mms support. (#30) · Issues · Librem5 / chatty

[ktmr]

@Skalman

I think currently it works well enough for calls and regular SMS messages but you get trouble when someone tries to send you an MMS, as far as I know that is still silently discarded.

Not only is your inbound MMS message discarded but you also won’t receive any SMS for approximately 3 days.

[Skalman]

@ktmr

you also won’t receive any SMS for approximately 3 days

It used to be like that, but I think that part has been fixed, it was the “handle transfer-route MT messages” fix in ModemManager (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-broadband/ModemManager/-/merge_requests/495) that has made its way into PureOS also about a month ago (see https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/debs/ModemManager/-/commit/d702914f502a4c4890b29b5800f8cc968a4a90b1).

[ktmr]

Thanks for the links. I really should upgrade from amber…

[dos]

The fix for that is already in amber-phone as well.