The AOSP (Android Open Source Project) has never failed to give us an insight into what’s going on behind the scenes at Android. It also allows anyone to modify the code to their liking and often gives us sneak peeks into some upcoming Android features. Though not all of them make it to a final release, some of the ideas presented there are interesting. For example, an earlier commit showed us how Android R would allow users to store their documents such as drivers licenses digitally. XDA Developers came across another interesting commit today. It mentions a feature that can be loosely described as ‘smart call forwarding.’
The feature is intended for dual-SIM phones, which have only just marked their presence in the North American market. If one of your numbers happens to be unreachable, Smart Call Forwarding will kick in and will redirect all your calls from an unreachable number to the working one on your device. It requires two SIMs to be present in your device, and one has to be unreachable. Once those conditions are met, users will be able to trigger the functionality from the Android UI. Here is the feature description from the commit that sheds more light on it.
There is no mention on any carrier intervention in the commit, but it is reasonable to assume that service providers will have to support Smart Call Forwarding from their end to make it work. The commit hasn’t been merged yet, which means that it isn’t a part of any Android version that’s releasing anytime soon. We’ve seen plenty of features show up in the AOSP source code that is yet to see the light of day. Some have, and others die somewhere along the way, so it’ll be interesting to see if Smart Call Forwarding makes it to Android R, if not Android Q.
