Better Dialer?

Hi everyone,

I can’t find anything in f-droid and thus wonder: is there a better Dialer than the AOSP one?
The AOSP Dialer is quite annoying as the call log is almost useless and its interface is so clunky that its always easy to call someone by mistake, for example when trying to open the numpad or see details.

There seem to be a few proprietary ones in the play store, but so far I couldn’t find an open source dialer, even on github and elsewhere.

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Search-based launchers usually have dialer abilities if you like this type of interface.

E.g. KISS

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This is a great question, and I’d also love to know of any alternatives. Almost all issues I face are related to the fact that most of the features are difficult to discover or interpret, especially for users who are new to smart phones (e.g. my grandfather). Some issues I have include:

It is not clear how to open the numpad. This makes it extremely difficult for people with no smartphone experience (e.g. my grandfather) to dial numbers not in the address book. It also makes it hard to engage with phone menus (“Press 5 if your call is about insurance…”). The fact that you need to click on the tab which is labeled with a :star: in order to view the button with 9 dots, which reveals the numpad, is quite obtuse.

Often I’ll have a phone number in my clipboard (e.g. from a website - which didn’t use a tel: URL to link the phone number to the dialer). In order to paste this into the phone, I have to open the dialer (using the merry dance I described above), and then get presented with two empty white spaces. The first white space is reserved to show the best matching contact for any phone number you’ve typed in, and the second white space is a text input for you to put the number in. However, when you haven’t typed anything in, then it is quite unclear that you need to select the second empty white space in order to put the phone number.

When viewing a contact, it is hard to know what is going to happen. For example, in the “Frequently called” tab, it will dial that persons phone number. In the “Recent call list” it will expand to show a little bit of context about the person. In the “Contacts” list, it will show up a modal dialog with the contacts picture and a bunch of actions which can be performed.

In the main screen of the phone, people may accidentally call somebody when trying to open the dial pad. If you miss the FAB which opens the dialer, then you will call one of the contact’s from a tile behind that.

I’m sure there are other things which annoy me about this, but essentially I think that the whole process could be simplified greatly…

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This depends on OEM so you can’t really most of the features are difficult to discover or interpret, yes the Google way works as you say, but not others.

Eg. Huawei dialer shows numpad with recent above and tabs on top for Contacts and favourites

Eg. Samsung has tabs above with keyboard/Contacts/Recents/.Favourites, also remembers your last view

When you long-press, instead of copy, press CALL ?! This is an OEM thing as well…

I absolutely agree, I think it’s a very poor design decision of the AOSP dialer to not open the numpad by default.
Even worse is, that the dialer button is not that intuitive and with smaller screens the chances are high that you just hit a contact directly below it.
In my opinion, Samsungs proprietary dialer gets it largely right and is much more usable in every respect.

@Ildar: The Launcher based dialers are interesting if you’re very contact based, I understand why people like that. However, for me the numpad and especially a call log with good timing information (call time, exact time of all calls, …) are very important and the launcher-integrated dialers can’t really do that. Thanks for the hint though.

I’m really considering writing my own, but that’s probably a much larger task than it seems.

Dialer2 (Clean T9-like dialer)?

Dialer2 unfortunately always crashes a few seconds after the start and the code seems to be abandoned.
Apart from that, it’s a little bit too simple, the call log not really usable, and it has no built-in alphabetical contacts feature.

I faced a similar problem some time ago and ended modifying the LineageOs dialer, just changing some
showDialpadFragment(false);
mShowDialpadOnResume = false;
to true and adding
mDialpadFragment.dialButtonPressed();
at the right place did the work for me.
HTH

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