Android Auto Cannot Place Calls on Some Foldables, and That Is Enough to Disqualify a Phone

On several foldable phones, Android Auto takes incoming calls but cannot make outgoing ones. It is an acknowledged bug with no fix yet.

I do not take calls while driving, so this specific failure would not reach me. I still think it is disqualifying, and the reason is what the car has become.

I spend hours in the car. In that time the phone is choosing music, running the GPS and reading WhatsApp out loud, all of it on the dashboard screen, hands on the wheel. That is not a nice extra. It is the single environment where the phone has to work without me looking at it, because the alternative is looking at it while driving. A phone that misbehaves there is not inconvenient, it is the one place where a bug has a cost measured in attention.

So when a manufacturer ships a folding phone with a broken car integration, the question is not whether you make calls. It is what else they decided was not worth testing, and whether the folding screen got all the attention while the boring part that keeps you safe got none.

This is also why a bug like this does not get fixed by patience. Android Auto failures on specific hardware have a long history of sitting unfixed between two companies that each believe it is the other one’s problem.

So, do I buy it? Not that model, not while this is open. If you spend real time in a car, treat the car integration as a requirement you test in the shop, not as a feature you assume works because it works on every other phone.