Click-to-Dial Conference Bridge Support on iOS 15.4

The following bulletin addresses our support for Click-to-Dial functionality affecting all iOS versions of MultiLine Apps (Movius MultiLine, Movius for Blackberry, MultiLine for Intune, and T-Mobile MultiLine). 

What is Click-to-Dial?

The Click-to-Dial feature is extremely helpful to our users because it automatically detects and renders phone numbers as links, and allows users to simply click the link to initiate a call using MultiLine. This includes calling contacts, numbers in emails and other apps, and conference bridges.  

For conference bridges, Click-to-Dial allows users to avoid dialing lengthy numbers, because with a single click, MultiLine apps dials the number, characters (including # or *) and additional digits in the dial string, such as Conference Codes and PINs.

Issue Background

This feature worked perfectly until iOS 15.4.  

  • In iOS version 15.4, Apple no longer accepted automated dialing strings that have the # (Hash or Pound sign) as a dialed digit.
  • This affected contacts or Click-to-Dial links that are used to log into login to conference bridges. These often use the # as part of the dialing string.
  • This affected Movius users that use “minutes” mode for outbound calls. It did not affect users that use “data” mode for outbound calls. See Call Settings.

To work around the issue, we implemented logic in our application to recognize when a user was on iOS 15.4 and transform the '#' to a ',' in the dial string that gets passed to the native dialer.  While it was not a perfect solution, in many cases it allowed the calls to complete, apart from a minor delay in connecting the call.

Issue Update

  • Apple has now released iOS versions 15.5 and 15.6 where the issue with passing # to the native dialer has been corrected.  
  • This means we can remove the workaround and allow MultiLine Apps to dial conference codes as intended. However, any users who haven't updated to iOS 15.45 or 15.6 will face issues dialing conference codes as described above.

Resolution

  • Movius will be deprecating support for Click-to-Dial on iOS 15.4. 
  • To avoid issues, users should upgrade to iOS 15.6 (current available release).
About this Article
  • Created: 08/25/2022 11:16 am EDT
  • Last updated: 08/31/2022 11:38 am EDT