lately we had to make an emergency call. My wife uses a Volla Phone X23 running Volla OS 15, which didn’t make the call. The screen flickered and she was back to the home screen. She tried three times. Luckily, she had a backup phone to make the call. This could have become seriously dangerous!
I wanted to ask in the Volla forum if anyone knew about this issue. Before posting, I found an entry of someone who had the same issue.
But the answers were like: That’s not our system, must be the apps you installed and use. But the used apps were the preinstalled one and the Fossify phone app. There was now help…
I understand, this can hardly be tested. But in such a situation a 100€ Samsung phone may have saved a life, while a 450€ Volla completely failed.
Now my daily driver is a Jolla C2 on 5.0.0.72. What about Jolla? Have you made any experiences with this? Can I rely on such a phone in case of emergency?
And more common: Might this be a general issue of custom roms or linux systems on phones? Or had my wife bad luck and normally this always works?
Yes this is about an actual try to call. The person ended up in a Chest Pain Unit, so quite serious.
I mean a phone should be able to phone in any circumstance. That’s its purpose.
I never heard of any mainstream phone failing here. Even 30€ feature phone’s don’t fail here. But maybe I just did not hear of it But I know for sure, that at least two long outdated mainstream phones didn’t fail here.
Manufacturers and network providers have common agreements here, because of which this works in general.
My suspection was, that any custom rom or alternative OS needs to get to work with the modems one or another way, e.g. through contability layers etc. Something might have gone wrong here…
Therefore I wish I knew if I am safe with my C2 when initiating an emergency call for me or someone else…
EDIT: Normal phone calls always worked! It’s just about emergency calls, which seem to function different somehow
Emergency calls are different from normal calls somehow (not fully informed on this). You are supposed to be able to call the emergency number from anywhere, and even without a SIM card. Swedish network providers have started banning certain devices from their networks due to lack of compatibility. The device must be on their list of devices capable of making 4/5g emergency calls. A lot of devices supporting regular 4/5g calls (volte) are being banned.
This is worrying. I’m not sure my C2 will make emergency calls, today or in the future when the last provider (telia) shuts down their 2/3g fallback network. I won’t bother the dispatch central for even one second by making a test call. And without trying I can’t really know if it’ll work.
I think this is a serious issue. Like you said, the phone really needs to work like a phone in those situations. I think the C2 offers a really good calling experience normally. I haven’t had any issues att all, and the sound quality is quite good. But who knows if it can make emergency calls… Has anyone reading this had to make an emergency call with a C2?
For particular cases please file a Bug Report and try to provide as much necessary information as possbile (country, emergency number, used network, roaming or not, network operator of your SIM, VoLTE or CSFB, ..).
[rant]
That was then. Since dropping the words Global and Universal from the standards monikers, it seems the industry descended into a mess of optional bits of compliance called Long-Term Evolution (LTE). Not only did this result in losing general roaming capability (their 4G is not your operator’s 4G), but emergency calls now require unique support. Even phones that are otherwise fully functional, using VoLTE etc, may not be able to make emergency calls. You can’t tell as a user of a phone and you can’t try calling 112 to find out…
[/rant]
I had to do an emergency call not long ago, an with my Xperia 10 III did not work. It just was not able to establish the communication, even the network coverage was perfect. I do not remember now which SFOS version was installed back then.
I must confess, that this is quite worring me.
It’s like “you* had one job”, making the most important call ever and it fails.
*phone
If this is not adressed properly and proved to be working, I do not think that a jolla phone is a good companion as primary phone. (And just for tinkering around it is too expensive for me.)
I raised this as an topic for the next community meeting, as I also think this is very important topic. Everyone with additional info are encouraged to write that down in easily readable form if you want to have answered to that specifically Community meeting on 18th December 2025 - #5 by CLMA31
Jolla’s homeland Finland recently shut down the 3G networks, but will maintain 2G as a fallback for older devices. This may “unfortunately” save some 4/5G-phones that rely on 2/3G for emergencies and which now get blocked in other countries that only go 4/5G. But I hope 3G-shutdown issues in Finland (and I understand there are quite a few) at least raise sufficient awareness for the problem among the developers.
The problem likely arose when Volla installed the green Fossify phone app alongside the blue phone app when Simple Mobile Tool was sold and forked as Fossify. The recommendation was always to disable only one of the two apps. Later, there will supposedly be a way to uninstall the unused app. No idea why the old app wasn’t installed from the start, perhaps to avoid data loss, or maybe it’s too deeply integrated into the system.
