Re: Voicemail pauses when I put phone up to my ear
xxxxxxxcc
Enthusiast - Level 2

You have a lot of apps. We both have the following:

Adobe Acrobat

Amazon Shopping

Capital One

Capital One Wallet

Cartwheel

Device Manager

DropBox

eBay

Facebook

Galaxy Apps

Google News & Weather

LastPass

McDonald's

Netflix

Nova Launcher

Payflex

PayPal

Samsung Pay

Target

Who else has any of these?

Re: Voicemail pauses when I put phone up to my ear
RickBeatty
Enthusiast - Level 3

Three way overlap...

From the list you two have in common I also have:

Device manager

Facebook

EBay

Amazon shopping

Galaxy apps

Samsung pay

So what do you say Verizon? Which of these do you blame?

Re: Voicemail pauses when I put phone up to my ear
dave1997
Enthusiast - Level 2

Same problem with the Galaxy S8.  I tried a suggestion on another post that said to wipe the partition cache.  That worked briefly, but when I received another voicemail, the problem was back.  A quick search of the internet shows that this seems to be widespread. 

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Re: Voicemail pauses when I put phone up to my ear
samanthat_vzw
Verizon Employee

RickBeatty, we appreciate you guys working together to identify the apps you have in common and narrow down the root cause of the voicemail issue. If you happen to try uninstalling these apps (or disabling them if they're built in)  and notice that the issue isn't happening anymore, please keep us posted. We will be glad to lift this directly up to Samsung to keep them informed and work on correcting the problem with the application developer. We would also recommend contacting the developer directly as well so they're properly informed about this customer experience too.

SamanthaT_VZW

Follow us on TWITTER @VZWSupport

If my response answered your question please click the _Correct Answer_ button under my response. This ensures others can benefit from our conversation. Thanks in advance for your help with this!

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Re: Voicemail pauses when I put phone up to my ear
jed9340
Enthusiast - Level 3

Chanfam, 48crash, and RickBeatty, I love where you guys are going with this and appreciate your effort. I work in software development and get super frustrated when companies like this try the PR name blame game. It's clearly their app but not willing to fix it. So in camaraderie with you who are making an effort, here are the apps you listed that I also have installed

Galaxy apps

Facebook

Amazon

Samsung pay

(strange how most of these are builtin...)

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Re: Voicemail pauses when I put phone up to my ear
RickBeatty
Enthusiast - Level 3

The main and most obvious thing we all have in common is Verizon's modified version of Android.

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Re: Voicemail pauses when I put phone up to my ear
Chanfam
Enthusiast - Level 3

Funny, I work as a Software QA Analyst.  I have not had the chance to go through these apps yet to see what happens if I force stop or uninstall the two that I believe can be, but what I am also interested to learn is what version of the Voicemail app does every one here have (open the app > menu > settings > about)?

I have a strong feeling that it is the Verizon Voicemail app that is the issue because on my previous phone (Samsung S7 Edge which I still have) I have ALL of the same Apps and the only difference I can find is the version of the Voicemail app - it is 5.x.x.x.  On my current phone (Samsung S8+) it is version 10.x.x.x.  That leads me to believe it is the Voicemail app not playing nice with a third party app and not the other way around.  The thing that bothers me the most is if a Verizon Voicemail dev came on and had us enable debugging and review the logs around the pause event, they shouild be able to tell us the exact cause of the issue.  Instead we have to deal with reps who just tell us to Factory Reset (in no way a proper answer for this issue) or uninstall a bunch of apps to find the culprit (which for me would take forever).  It really bothers me that most of the other Verizon bloatware apps are on the Play store where you can (supposably) email the development team for that app, but yet this Voicemail app does not exist anywhere and has no developer support option from the app.  Makes me think they know it is a pile of you know what.

Re: Voicemail pauses when I put phone up to my ear
DKP89MN
Enthusiast - Level 3

I believe I've solved this. I've been experiencing the exact problem being described for some time now (on my Samsung Galaxy S6) and decided this afternoon to figure it out once and for all. I've found that using ANY lock screen security causes the Voice Mail app to pause playback when bringing the phone to my face or swiping my hand across the screen. Disabling lock screen security is the only solution I've found to prevent the pause from happening. This of course means that Android Pay will not work and results in removal of any payment method stored on the account. I imagine the same holds true for Samsung Pay, but I uninstalled that as one of my first trouble-shooting steps. BOOM!

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Re: Voicemail pauses when I put phone up to my ear
Chanfam
Enthusiast - Level 3

While I will test this as well, I would not call it a solution as leaving it disabled is not an option for me.  If that does resolve the issue, though, it would confirm the issue is with the app as I expect.  I also find it important to note that this behavior does not exist in other apps that preform similar functions - like Google Voice where I can listen to voicemails from that line with no pausing when the screen blacks out from the proximity sensor.

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Re: Voicemail pauses when I put phone up to my ear
jed9340
Enthusiast - Level 3

I'm also a pro tester for a software/firmware company. Which version has the problem? I have an S6E+ which has the issue and its running version 5.0.42.

I agree that it's probably some dumb line in the code that duplicates the behavior with the phone app in turning the screen off temporarily to prevent accidentally pushing buttons with your face, but like most audio playback apps it is also designed to pause playback when the screen is off. The true developer would just look up this line, say "I'm an [removed]", edit the line, push the update, and we can live happily. However, if you do some googling, it appears this issue dates back quite a few years with the same bot answer from Verizon customer service, "wipe cache, reboot".

I've started looking into other app options but was never too fond of telling all my contacts to start calling my Google voice number instead. Don't feel like they should suffer cause I can't get my builtin Verizon apps to work. I kind of want to just write off this app as useless, but this conversation and the tester in me has my interest piqued.

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