Enable VoLTE/Video Calling for Chinese carriers

carbonfree

Three major Chinese carriers, China Mobile (CMCC), China Telecom, and China Unicom, all support VoLTE and Video Calling, but these are not enabled in AOSP carrier config. LTE_CA (4G+) is supported as well.

If people want to use Pixel comfortably in China, they have to root their device (Pixel 5-) or use https://github.com/kyujin-cho/pixel-volte-patch which doesn't require root but is still verbose since they need to reconfigure it every OTA.

I sincerely hope GrapheneOS can enable them by default, so it will make our life much easier, thanks!

carbonfree

The preferred config for these carriers should be:

Enable VoLTE
Enable Video Calling
Enable Enhanced 4G LTE (LTE+)
Show 4G for LTE Data Icon

VoWiFi is not supported by all of them.

carbonfree

Also, I would like to ask, is it possible for GrapheneOS to turn on 5G ENDC settings in the modem for Chinese carriers?

If so, we can unlock 5G in China directly without root, that will be awesome!

hamlet9371

The root solution mentioned above is now probably the only way available to enable 5G on Pixels in China. Without it Pixels' network performance here will likely to be increasingly weakened in the next couple of years due to the Inactive maintenance of 4G infrastructures, and perhaps become completely unavailable someday (probably withing the lifetime of Pixel8 series). It will be very nice if GOS make a rootless solution so that its powerful features will keep contributing to anti-censorship movement in China.

other8026

I'd suggest referring to this issue in the issue tracker: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/956.

Also, since the VoLTE "patch" app was mentioned earlier, I think it's worth copying and pasting this quote from the same issue about ADB

ADB provides a massive amount of access even on a production (user) build, and on a userdebug build it even provides root access. ADB without the network feature relies on requiring physical access in addition to key-based authentication which expires. Network ADB support is actually quite problematic and is a malware persistence method reducing the security provided by verified boot substantially.

cdflasdkesalkjfkdfkjsdajfd

other8026 the main solution provided by the app using all people to enable voLTE and voWIFI uses ADB, but GOS will do the same without need of ADB, only by modifying a line from the Android code

other8026

cdflasdkesalkjfkdfkjsdajfd Not sure, but I think it might be a little more complicated than that. Maybe just ignoring the carrier config values for this specific setting would be a one line thing, but the issue that I linked is about adding the option for users to override. They could take a different approach than one you might be thinking of, one that might enable people to override other restrictions, not just VoLTE.

There's an open issue for it, so that means they either plan on looking into it or plan to when they get the chance. Sometimes features or changes are decided against, though.

As usual, project members always suggest that if community members want to indicate that they want a feature, they can add a reaction to the issue/feature request. You can see it's a popular one already.

de0u

cdflasdkesalkjfkdfkjsdajfd GOS will do the same without need of ADB, only by modifying a line from the Android code

Like other8026 I suspect a robust solution will be more complicated than just a few lines of code. But I could be wrong! If it's possible to identify a commit (or a couple) which adds a VoLTE-override toggle in some other Android variant (maybe LineageOS?), that might help. It's unlikely that it would apply directly, but it might still be useful in terms of it being easier for a GrapheneOS developer to start from something rather than nothing.

I believe the GrapheneOS developers don't want "I want this too" comments on GitHub issues, but I suspect pointers to relevant code (for a permanent Settings change, not for a Shizuku temporary override) might be considered in-scope.

GGORG

I think the best approach for making the user-facing part of this is to just give us the same options as in pixel-volte-patch, but integrated into the os. I'm not sure if the same backend code could work, but I suspect it will not.