Dual-sim mobile phones: dissociate uses by cards and simultaneous activation of 2 cards in transmission and reception

General
#1

Hello sailors,

I use a sony XA2 PLUS DUAL SIM: the first sim is for personal use while the other is for professional use.

I would like to know if it is possible to improve the management of dual sim mobile phones for mainly:

  • dissociate the uses linked to each sim card
  • have the possibility of simultaneously activating the 2 cards in transmission AND reception

Currently, you have to choose which card answers calls and messages, because if both cards are active for reception, only one is active for transmission. For me this management is a source of many errors on a daily basis with my interlocutors. I often do not see clearly what is the source of the call or the message. I forget to reactivate the right card to answer calls or messages and my contacts can see my 2 phone numbers. In addition, the search for contacts of one or the other of these 2 categories (professional / personal) is laborious, because there is no distinction everything is mixed. Likewise, putting one or the other of the sims on standby would make it possible to better manage uses: in the evenings and weekends, I would like to cut the professional line while the week during the day, I would like to put in watch the personal line. Finally, 2 phones would probably be easier to manageā€¦

Here is a summary of the functions that I think are necessary to manage dual sim phones:

  • make calls and answer messages without having to change sim cards on the fly
  • associate a ringtone by sim card to immediately identify the source
  • separate professional and personal contacts or be able to view their connection to one or the other of the sim cards
  • have an ā€œairplaneā€ mode capable of switching to standby a single sim card at a time

Is there an application which already responds to this mode of management of dual sim cards (jolla store, openrepos, android ā€¦) ?

Can Jolla implement in a future update of the system at least a function allowing to activate the 2 sim cards simultaneously in reception AND transmission so that it is possible to make calls and send messages without having to switch from there to each other like today?

If not, is it possible to create such an application or are there any technical or software restrictions ? Therefore, is it possible for a beginner (me) to design such an application and with what basic knowledge to acquire?

good to you.

4 Likes
Bluetooth and Car Kit and Dual-SIM: calling (still) unreliable/random
#2

First
Both cards can be online and receive calls,
obviously not at the same time as you have only one handset :wink:
You can also configure which card should be used for data and you can select which card should be used when calling/messaging in settings
(Unfortunately I have at the moment only one card/SD card, so I cannot give you more hints)

Second
There is no ringtone selection for cards. I would like that, too. But do not see Jolla implementing it. And afaik there is no app like that.
Closest is coderus ā€˜personal ringtonesā€™ on openrepos but that is per contact.

Third
Separate contacts or distinction of private, office, fun numbers is not there. But asked for long timeā€¦

Fourth
There is, in settings SIM cards you can enable/disable one card (one must be active).

So?

#3

thank you for your reply, but they do not satisfy me.

This is because you donā€™t appear to be a dual sim phone user. Regarding point 3), in the settings functions, the 2 cards once inserted in their sim slot are active and configurable, but it is not possible to deactivate one (type ā€œairplane modeā€ function).

Can someone from Jolla or a developer tell me, if technically the activation of 2 sim cards in simultaneous emission is possible? If so, Iā€™ll try to develop an app of what Iā€™m missing.

#4

You are welcome.

???

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What is your question?
Have two SIM cards enabled at the same tim

You are welcome.

???

Screenshot_20200730_001_edit
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What is your question now?

Having two SIM cards enabled at the same timeĀæ
Yes!
This allows you to receive calls on both cards. While making a call on one card the other is busy. You may define one card for outgoing calls or choose every time.

Disable one of the two SIM cardsĀæ
Yes! (see above pic)

#5

Thank you, you are right, your screenshot shows that it is a function of activating sim cards, like light switch.

For example: if you have activated sim nĀ°2, as main, and someone sends you a message from sim1, can we reply to them without changing the default active card? No, you have to make a manual change each time: for reminders and replies to messages.

The idea would be that depending on the sim at the origin of the message or the call, the device is able to activate the appropriate card to answer or call without having to go through a specific manipulation. Likewise, depending on the classification of contacts in the phonebook by sim, you can activate the right card on the fly without worrying about it.

Am I clear?

Another aspect of this question, is it technically possible to perform this function or is sailfish x development APIs insufficient and not allowing it?

1 Like
#6

I am afraid not.

If you have only card #2 active no one os able to call (i.e. reach) you or send you a message (read: your device will not receive it as the card is switched off).
Is this clear?

You want auto-enabling of SIM cards depending on your action - a call or a message to the other deactivated SIM?
This is not possible as the SIM is in ā€˜flight-modeā€™.
Sounds like if you want to push the call button inside of a plane with enabled flight mode to auto-activate cellular connectivity. Not a good idea!

#7

I am sending you a screenshot which shows which sim card is active in EMISSION (here nĀ°2 NRJ MOBILE only). It is this function that causes me problem, because you must change every time, for me 20x per days

Capture d'eĢcran_20200730_001
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Yes, i want auto-enabling of SIM cards depending on my action - a call or a message to the other SIM, contactā€¦

#8

This is not foreseen nor implemented in SFOS.
And I am not sure whether it would be a good idea / allowed at all (see above).

But you migh tinker with dbus, grab the right signal (call/message initiation), emit signal to activate SIMx and retry the initiationā€¦

#9

I think youā€™re talking past each other, activate/enable vs. change/active/default sim card. For the latter both cards have to be enabled and thatā€™s what @pitix means I guess.

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#10

And that is what I tried to explain a few posts earlier.
If he wants to decide from which card to call/message on the fly both cards needs to be online.

#11

Your input in this thread has been worthless. Time for you to move on to something else, since you are clearly not grasping the basic problem described - something that made me give up on using two SIM cards with Sailfish already back in the Aquafish days.

#12

I have just quickly scrolled through this topic, and here are my two cents.

Dual SIM settings could be more granulate (associate contacts/groups to a SIM), but I have absolutely no trouble using two SIM cards all the time in an XA2+ with Sailfish. It is obviously ā€œstandby dual SIMā€, but that means that I get calls to both SIM cards, so I am reachable. My operator sends me a text if someone tried to call me while I was ā€œoff the networkā€ (i.e. talking on the other SIM), so I havenā€™t missed any call because of this. It also became a stable routine to toggle the SIM selection before making a call or sending a text, so Iā€™m not mixing them up anymore like in the beginning.

1 Like
#13

Could you elaborate then, please?
To make it understandable for us dummies :wink:

#14

Another ā€œsolutionā€ would be to go to the Sim card screen and select the Always ask option, then there is no ā€œdefaultā€ SIM, so before each action you will get a prompt to select the SIM you want. It is a bit easier than going through the top drawer menu and turn on/off the ā€œdefaultā€ card. It does not automatically select the ā€œcorrectā€ SIM to use but it makes manual selection much easier.

Screenshot_20200731_001
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3 Likes
#15

There are lots of suggestions on this subject in that topic here Improve Dual-SIM support - #5 by lzbk
There are other topics deal with this (or bugs related to SIM card choice) :

#16

Ok, today I finally give it a try to test SFOS support of dual sim.

Mainly itā€™s because of this:

And the harsh truth is that it works but itā€™s done in very very basic way which is cumbersome and as mentioned by @pitix prone to errors and leaking numbers to the third party.

Based on the above Iā€™d like to resurrect this thread to improve the dual sim usage. In the near future Iā€™d like to finally stop using my two phones and move totally to SFOS. Iā€™m on Xperia 10 which except of the touch issues doesnā€™t show any hard bugs. Actually I must say that more of the problems are related to missing basic functionalities than real problems. Some of them are trivial, some are easy to fix with patches (Iā€™m looking now at gallery sharing!) but there are some like dual-sim which is a stopper. And Iā€™m not surprised @pitix asked for it. Iā€™m totally with @Michael that he gave up on SFOS for dual sim.

But a star has been shown thanks to @pvuorela with his patch for bringing second sim card ringtone in the future. For sure there will be some work needed yet but at least we have foundation now!

Sadly thereā€™s much work to do so SFOS will be really usable in this area. On this forum there are users that use SFOS as a business phone. I can make a bet that many of them are either using dual sim of sfos or using second phone. Either way they will also benefit from these changes.

I personally use two phones where one is of course private and second is for giving away the number everywhere. So I donā€™t need to care about it and I can always throw it away and get a new one.

Now, @pitix describe main functionality improvements and what he want is generally how it should be done.

@cquence shown that SFOS can always ask which sim card should be used to send message or make a call and this is great but, it should be only needed when we do a call/sms for the first time to someone or weā€™re manually entering the phone no/sms.

So let me summary what @pitix wanted as how I do see this based on my use case as also how I see like another person with whom Iā€™m living is using dual sim and also how dual sim functionalities are handled by Galaxy A41/Android 12.

  • contacts app, must provide option to select which sim card should be used when making calls/sms to that person. In case that the default sim card for that person is not available for any reason, a confirmation dialog should be opened to ask if the second sim card should be used this one and only time.
  • messages must show which card was the destination of the message and when replying the same card must be used. Of course if the card is not present/available, handle this same way as above which is, display dialog and ask to use second card just this one time.

Of course the above and extra info/settings should be visible only and only when user has dual sim capability and both cards are present or contacts already contains card association.

So actually it all comes down to improving contacts app so it will allow to preserve sim card association.

This is a must for a dual-sim support. Because I canā€™t imagine always remembering which card I need to use to reply to someone or make a call.
I think this is a good topic for great feature request and improvement for SFOS and it could got as a major improvement of the system.

And by the way, we also need the option to name the sim cards (thereā€™s a patch for this) and assign colors so this could be used in the contacts app and messages. Like for example in the Talk app thatā€™s in the shop.

@flypig can we make feature request from this one? It seems SFOS lost at least two users because of this.

Improve dual-sim user exeirience
#17

I can move the thread into the ā€œFeature Requestsā€ category, but my suggestion would be to make a new topic there and I will link to it and close this thread.

Youā€™ve already written a nice summary, so Iā€™d suggest cutting and pasting that text to create the new topic.

The reason I suggest this is that the discussion here, while definitely useful, is likely to be distracting: the cleaner and simpler a feature request is, the easier it is to act on. Having said that, if you want me to just move everything to the other category, let me know and I will do that.

#18

@flypig ok, Iā€™ll handle this and let you know once itā€™s ready - thank you!

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#19

Iā€™m not following this part of the message. With just the systemsettings PR you are not able to test really anything, itā€™s merely exposing a profiled setting to QML. Testing what Iā€™ve now done requires 4 more PRs on different projects.

ā€œError prone, leaking to the third partyā€, Iā€™m not sure either what these mean.

#20

sure I do understand thatā€™s why I said that itā€™s a good foundation to begin with :wink:
It would be great to add also that sms handling. If you donā€™t believe me with that Galaxy phone settings Iā€™m attaching here the sshot of it (Galaxy A41) itā€™s in Polish language so Dzwonek means Ringtone, and DÅŗwięk powiadomienia means Notification Sound.
I had to wipe out the sim card names because they did contain personal data.

galaxy_a41_sshot
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let me explain. So right now with current SFOS when you reply to some SMS you have to figure out somehow which sim card was the target of the SMS. If you donā€™t know it it may end up that for SMS that had a target Sim1 youā€™ll reply from Sim2 means that for message directed to your company number/public number, youā€™ll reply from Sim2 which is your private/personal phone number. Hence the second person will know your second number. Now if youā€™re working with people you probably know that they will call you whenever they want so itā€™s common to turn off the public/official number for night and leave the private one for friends and family as they will call you only if itā€™s something really urgent.

Without information on the screen which sim was the target of the SMS one need to check out who was writing but if itā€™s some new number, thereā€™s currently no way of finding this at all. At least I donā€™t see it. So this should be fixed and probably at the same time the little text on the incoming call screen with information which sim card is the call directed to, should be also increased. Cause itā€™s a bit to small and can be easily missed but once the ringtones will be in place, that issue will be much smaller cause someone will first hear it before seeing it.

I hope this make this a bit more clear. Let me know if you need more explanation or catch me on IRC to get live talk :wink:

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