Zulu Mobile completely useless

What mobile device are you using? In my setup here, I have only a few mobile devices, Samsung and one iPhone. I’ve been working with Sangoma with several issues with the mobile. Right now, I will state incoming calls are the most problematic. I also have Zulu restarting randomly quite a bit.

For the most part, it takes about 2 rings before the mobile device will ring. However, the desktop version of Zulu has been ringing pretty quickly, in about 1-2 secs, rather than rings.

I’ve made some changes on the Samsung phones that help, but it sometimes will take about 2 rings. Make sure you turn off battery optimization as that seems to help with incoming calls. There is a bug, if you use queues, that you may receive a constant call to your mobile phone if a call is answered in about 1 ring.

If it helps, I’m running:
PBXAct: 14.0.13.28
Zulu Server: 14.0.58.7
Zulu Desktop Client: v3.5.0 or 3.5.1-alpha1+211
Zulu Mobile (Beta): 1.1.0.358 (found under settings in the Zulu app)

Chris

And yet support has on multiple occasions on this case and others told users otherwise (I think).

FYI, as a frequent consumer of tech support, trying to resolve issues like this by interfacing with folks whose English skills are so poor is crazy-making. We steer clients away from products with off-shored support, so this change is not a positive move at all for end users or the folks out here evangelizing for FreePBX and its commercial modules.

I would agree, if there is a language barrier it becomes difficult. However, the past tickets that I’ve opened with Sangoma, the techs have been easy to understand. @lgaetz, @slobera, @jackcampbell, have been easy to work with and helpful. However, they’ve had to move many of my Zulu questions onto development. At this point, most of my outstanding issues are waiting for updates from development.

I appreciate their help and willingness to screen share, grab logs and reproduce issues. Sometimes, it is just a few emails back and forth or a phone call. Either case, those techs above have been very helpful and supportive and have given a good experience with Sangoma.

Chris

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Hello @FreerPBXer

Sangoma has 27/7 world wide support, and yes we have people in different regions.
We do not offload 100% of support in different regions, we work as one team.
Furthermore, we have minimum english proficiency requirements though I must agree with you that
the responses you are pasting do not look good! I will review this with support.

Also the EDGE policy in Sangoma is that all code pushed to EDGE must pass QA.
We never push non QA code to EDGE. Thus, the idea of EDGE is for production testing of QA code, before we push it to production. Hope that clears that point.

The problem with push notifications & app background activity is a widespread issue (android &ios). It is not Sangomas fault that the makers of Android & iOS have implemented insane battery saving features, which make most smartphones useless…
App developers have to implement all sorts of workarounds to ensure basic functionality.
Last time I checked, my Iphone 11 wasnt even able to receive emails in realtime using Apple Mail without an Exchange server. When it slept, it did not send me any email alerts. This is crazy! Therefore I switched to a Oneplus 8 pro.

Here is an example of settings required for a simple alarm system to deliver push notifications to a smartphone nowadays (same applies to the apple)…brave new world :wink:

The more extensions I add to a ring group, the slower Zulu will ring. Im using ring all.
If I have under 10 extensions it rings a few seconds later. If I have more, it takes a lot more time. If I have over 15, then It will ring just before the failover.

I can confirm this behaviour, see also Zulu, delayed ringing in larger queues and that’s regardless of using the mobile app or the desktop app.

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This is incorrect. I have the Bria Enterprise platform. All my clients use IPv4 on their Bria (including me) and it works fine on Android and iOS. I never miss any calls on Bria and I don’t even need to enable Push Services because it backgrounds just fine.

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Just reporting our experience using the current and older version of Bria as PJSIP endpoints at two FreePBX installs. If the mobile devices are outside the network on IPv6 enabled cellular data systems, they would not connect and there was not, at the time, an option to limit them to IPv4. YMMV

Well there is a difference between only having IPv6 network available vs only usable on IPv6. If the cell network doesn’t have a way to convert IPv6<>IPv4 then it doesn’t matter it will always be IPv6 regardless of the softphone. Do the mobile carriers have or allow IPv4 on their networks for their users? Do they have a way to convert that?

Dear Nenad,

We provided the ticket numbers ([#954601] and [#955268]) but nobody contacted us.

@slobera Yes I confirm I am able to send a push notification and get the message on my mobile phone even if the Zulu Mobile app is closed.

@ncorbic

  1. Can you make outbound calls? Yes
  2. Can you receive inbound calls when application is in foreground? Yes
    2b. Can you receive inbound calls when application is in background? Sometimes/random
  3. Can you receive inbound calls when application is closed? No

We have:

  • iPhone 11 IOS 13.3.1 running Zulu 1.1.0.420
  • Xiaomi 9 SE Android 11.0.6.0 Zulu 1.1.0.420

We provided two ticket numbers ([#954601] and [#955268]), can you please get anyone from support to assist?

Thank you!

I totally agree with you.
We bough 1000 licences and deployed 300 clients and it’s a mess.
It works unreliably, the call list doesn’t work and the support doesn’t answer or doesn’t solve issues.
I’m a big opensource fan and I use asterisk from 2008 but now I’m moving to a legacy solution that has better support and a working UC.

Giuseppe

I totally agree with you.

Alessandro

Geez, I didn’t realise that providing a solution might be considered as spam.

Anyway, regarding push notification. It’s really a pain in the a**. Especially on Android (particularly on Android). We’ve spent many hours working on this in our apps, but sometimes the app itself is not a problem, but rather phone’s settings. Moreover, device manufacturers while trying to optimise battery life or providing various “enhancements”, implement overlays or skins that run atop of the operating system (like OneUI on Samsung). For example, in Samsung Galaxy S6 there is a Smart Manager app which blocks push notification or fetches them less frequently.

Also, try doing the following on your device:

  1. Check that the app is in the exceptions list in the Energy/Battery optimisation settings.
  2. You should have at least one active Google account on your device
  3. Update Google Play Services to the latest version
  4. Check that the notifications are allowed for the app in your phone’s settings (Settings > Apps & Notifications > [App name] > Notifications)
  5. There might be also some network restrictions as push notifications are sent to the specific ports. You can check router and firewall settings as well as antivirus settings.

Unfortunately, even doing all the above mentioned it might happen so that push notifications are still not working. That’s because it requires lots of micro solutions to get it working on the variety of Android devices and that should be done on the developer’s side.

Anyway, if Zulu UC will not do the trick for you, you can try our solution (which is itself a solution for this topic!), which makes organising remote work much easier and it works on top of your FreePBX installation (actually, it works with any kind of phone systems). Will be happy to make a demo for you or anyone interested.

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Your solution was abandon Zulu and use your product. That is not providing a solution, that is marketing.

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I call 'em as I see 'em. Maybe someone would disagree, but I see a week old account with a single post promoting their own commercial product. If it walks like a duck …

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Well, I didn’t see a solution to the above-mentioned problem, so I provided one of them. Also, there were mentions of Bria here (and not only), but they weren’t labelled as spam. Maybe my language was a bit like a salesman, I apologise for that, but considering the fact that there are not too many alternatives in this field and not too many innovations (I do believe that we provide both), I don’t see any wrong by mentioning our product (or any other product) as a solution.

Aren’t we in a FreePBX forum? Aren’t we in a “Commercial Modules” topic? In fact, I did not provide an alternative for a FreePBX.

I agree with Lorne, and I’ve, more than once, had far more on-topic, entirely non-commercial posts removed.

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And I disagree with Lorne. He does what he should on the company’s forum, I understand that, but let’s not forget that this is a FreePBX forum and not a Zulu forum. Moreover, he mentioned that my account was created a week ago and so does a hundred of other accounts. Someone posts a problem, someone posts a solution. I can’t fix push notifications for Zulu and other problems that were mentioned here, but I can provide a solution, nevertheless.

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