Call button in google maps doesn’t open the dialer app

It turns out the format of the phone number in the link is to blame. For the example business I tested, the link is of the following form:

    <a target="_blank" href="tel://(512) 480-8181">CALL</a>

I initially suspected the _blank target was the problem, but it’s not (despite the fact that it makes for a bad user experience as it opens a new blank tab which then opens the dialer).

Not sure whether the problem is in oxide, url-dispatcher or dialer-app, so I’m adding tasks for all three projects until I can investigate further.

In oxide, in LaunchURLExternallyOnUIThread, the call to QUrl(QString::fromStdString(url.spec())) returns an invalid QUrl for "tel://(512) 480-8181", which explains why the URL dispatcher doesn’t open the dialer app.

Note that removing the // separator after the scheme ("tel:") makes it a valid URL for QUrl’s constructor.

Making it three forward slashes ("tel:///(512) 480-8181") also makes it a valid URL, for that matter. It’s really unfortunate that google maps puts only two slashes, making it an invalid URL.

I guess QUrl’s parser considers "(512) 480-8181" to be the host (and it’s obviously invalid).

In contrast, it seems that the GURL we get has an empty host, but its path is "//(512) 480-8181".

Either QUrl is too strict, or GURL is more tolerant with ill-formed URLs. Either way, the conversion blows up. We could probably have some logic to try and convert the GURL to a QUrl by pieces if the constructor returns an invalid one.

According to RFC 3966 (The tel URI for Telephone Numbers, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3966), forward slashes after the scheme are not valid syntax. So QUrl’s parser is right to reject them. In contrast, GURL has a custom parser (based on third-party code from mozilla) which, for all non-standard schemes (kStandardURLSchemes), always considers the host empty.

We could probably write a custom GURL->QUrl converter with added logic to parse valid GURLs that produce invalid QUrls.

I can’t reproduce the issue any longer, when I search businesses in google maps I’m now getting correctly-formed tel: links, e.g. for the Hilton Garden Inn in Austin I’m getting the following URL: "tel:(512) 480-8181", which is successfully converted to a valid QUrl.
I’ll mark the bug invalid now, will re-open in the future should the issue happen again.