Some device don’t have working volte with lineageos. This especially the case for samsung phones. 3g is quickly disappearing (if nlt already shut off)in many countries. Sometimes much faster than previously planned. For instance, in france free mobile decided to massively shut down 3g antennas in december 2025 (it was previously planned in 2028). My phone, which I bought from iodé 3 years ago, will become unusable in a matter of weeks. Oddly enough, it is still being sold in iodé shop.
I suggest you stop selling any phone model that doesn’t fully support volte. Most (if not all) samsung models are concerned.
I think that’s not entirely correct. If 3G is omitted, then telephony is with 2G. In Germany, for example, 3G has been switched off for a longer time and the Samsung phones are still working. Mobile data runs over 4G.
I don’t know for other countries, but in France 2G is being switched off in 2026.
For 3G, it will be by 2028-2029 (if not already started). So basically for french users there’s no point in buying a iodé smartphone with no effective VoLTE support.
Unfortunately, this and latest iodé (lineageos) breaking many apps because of google safetynet issue, I don’t see a bright future for custom ROMs…
I do understand your frustration, in the USA we have not had 3G or 2G since 2021 in most places and the lack of VoLTE support is why I had to leave Ubuntu Touch behind sadly.
But calls can be made with non-VoLTE capable phones using SIP or XMPP accounts such as jmp.chat in North America. You need cellular data of course, so after your carrier’s 2G/3G towers are gone that means 4G/5G, but even for older Samsung devices they support 4G LTE data (as does Ubuntu Touch ).
So I have suggested that iodé add a big warning / disclaimer to the Samsung devices in the shop noting that VoLTE is not available on them with a brief but clear explanation of what that is (and even possibly link the sunset guide @Taurus-II linked so users can check if they don’t know what all of that means).
And I do have SIP at work. But outside my office, I have to connect with a VPN to access my SIP server remotely… That’s a bit overkill just to make/receive phone calls, is it not?
So, yes, I think iodé shop should at least display a warning. Or it could just stop selling these phones, and only provide those with known VoLTE support.
Interesting, the differences between the individual countries. From the point of view of security, it is of course good if 2G is switched off (silent SMS).
As @volker01 notes, VoLTE is no problem for the Brax3 (when using an Android variant).
The problem for UT wasn’t that the devices didn’t support it, but that UT didn’t support it as part of ofono which is the telephony stack (largely developed by SailfishOS but a fork / variant is used by UT).
But since that time (2021) when 3G was shut off in the USA, especially in the last year, UT support for VoLTE has progressed. It still isn’t fully 100% reliable I think, and is only supported on a few devices, but it does work now for the lucky owners of those specific devices. Alas, my Pixel 3a XL fleet (the former “reference device” thanks to Alfred’s active development and support) still has non-functioning VoLTE with UT (but it has never had issues with any Android variant). I haven’t followed at all, but would be hopeful that the Brax3 would have VoLTE UT support.
But back to my history, as I didn’t have working VoLTE (again software side, not hardware side) and MMS support was less-than-ideal, it was hard to stay on UT at least for me and I had to sadly step away back to LOS 4 MG, and finally iodéOS!
Note: In UT, for all MMS, you need to disable Wifi and re-try downloading the message after you get an error that it can’t be delivered, since routing MMS via cellular data when wifi is active isn’t working.
In addition, for incoming group MMS messages, you receive an error, dig into the error log to find a list of the all the numbers that are part of the group, then you manually create a messaging group with those numbers and only those numbers in it, then at last you re-attempt downloading the group message and it should appear. This group would then keep working for subsequent messages. But if a person is added to or removed from the group, you repeat the whole process. Particularly digging through the error logs while on mobile was a bit of a pain. Usually I would wait until I was home, SSH in to sift the logs, then back on the mobile create the message group. You can see why I missed several extended family messages and photos of new babies and cats and travel destinations and food around those years . I believe MMS support still has not progressed beyond this “less-than-ideal” situation in UT. The devs don’t live in places where MMS is a priority like it sadly is in the USA.
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