No Voice or Text on Inland Cellular (non-MVNO) but Internet Data Works!

[calinb]

Also, I tested audio and mic on Anbox (Manjaro phosh). It works, so android sip apps and maybe the official google voice app could work if someone builds in microG or the playstore.

Video still not working but people are working on that.

I assume you're saying that video on Anbox is still a work in progress.

I've been researching SIP and DID providers (don't know the acronym but DID appears to be the SIP to POTS/phone number bridge). It gets a bit complicated and expensive, if you want a phone number. From what I gather, the "free" solutions are gone, though I found a couple that are paid-for by accepting ads deals (don't really know how that works). I guess ads are better than nefarious spying!

I'm also worried about NAT and other routing gotchas that might present problems with SIP when connected to hotspots. I read somewhere that one requires a number of open ports. Considering that Inland costs $45 per month, I'll probably drop the idea for now and re-visit Inland once they get VoLTE working. In the meantime, I'll try my prepaid H20 (an AT&T MVNO) SIM card, which I use when I travel to the big city! Maybe it will work (GSM network). Unless I travel often, $10 worth of prepaid service lasts me 3 months at 5 cents per minute or text!

I tried running Google Voice in Firefox under Arch on my Pinebook and it didn't work. It works on my MX Linux laptop though, as I mentioned. Maybe Chrome would work on the Pinebook but I'm not holding my breath. Also, Firefox uses a lot of power on the Pinebook and it gets very hot. I'll have to recheck the other Linux OSs for that hot Firefox effect. (FIRE--fox is right!)

As far as usability and functionality goes, I'm glad you mentioned Arch to me, because it works better for me than all the distros on my p-boot SD card or Manjora Beta1 that shipped with my phone or Beta2 (both stable and unstable). I would've written Arch off for now, because it doesn't boot from the p-boot SD (it boots to an error terminal from p-boot) but I wrote the latest Arch image from github to an SD card and it installed. It even updated just fine without breaking anything. HDMI works, headphones work (Manjora Beta2 enabled my HDMI but broke headphone output), menus size better on various aps under Arch, my Inland 4G connection is more stable (but still not perfectly stable as it sometimes drops out and it's still a bit difficult to get it back). Geary even still works under Arch (though Geary has some bugs like "compose new" launches and crashes the editor immediately. I can, however, open an existing email, remove its contents and "To/CC/BCC" entries, replace with new contents, and "forward" it to whatever new email address(es) I please.

It's strange that Arch is the most stable and bug-free distro I've tried, yet Manjaro is based on Arch and Manjaro mobile seems to have a larger development team than Arch mobile (which might be really only one guy, from what I saw on github). BTW, Arch didn't come with Geary by default, but Geary installed just fine from the repo using pacman, along with a few dependencies. I'd actually call Arch "beta" level software (though "alpha" vs. "beta" level criteria are not normally formally defined within open source dev communities). Everything else I've  tried on my PineBook performed no better than "alpha" in my book--just my opinion!