Android 12 prepares to kill off native support for Internet-based SIP calling

Session Initiation Protocol, or SIP, is a protocol that’s commonly used for making voice calls over the Internet. Years back, SIP clients and providers were decently popular because they offered free or cheap worldwide Internet-based calling while many U.S. carriers still didn’t even offer unlimited voice calls on their networks. For years, Android natively supported adding a SIP account and making SIP calls through the default dialer, but it seems that’s going away with the Android 12 update.

Starting in Android 12, it seems the stock dialer app — which on Pixel phones is the Google Phone app — no longer offers SIP settings. That means you can’t add a SIP account or use the stock dialer for SIP calls.

Google’s support page for making calls over Wi-Fi still lists SIP as an option, but their developer documentation notes that the SipManager class was deprecated in API level 31. Although the class was deprecated, it doesn’t seem like Android’s native SIP stack has been removed entirely — at least not yet.

Based on these commits, it seems that Google is getting ready to remove SIP calling support from Android’s telephony service entirely. Once the SIP service is removed from the framework, apps relying on Android’s native SIP stack may break. Since the commits don’t seem to have been merged yet, third-party apps with their own SIP client like ACR Phone Dialer should continue to work on Android 12, but we haven’t verified if they work. If you have a SIP account and can verify calls still work through a third-party SIP client that relies on Android’s native SIP stack, do let us know!

In any case, it’s clear that Google no longer considers SIP support a worthwhile feature to maintain in Android. The SIP stack hasn’t been updated in years, so it was pretty much abandoned already — these code changes just make it official.

Thanks to XDA Recognized Developer luca020400 for the tip!

The post Android 12 prepares to kill off native support for Internet-based SIP calling appeared first on xda-developers.

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