Phone blocks when receiving or making a call

[wiselynx]

Since today simple-dialer v.5.18.1 has this strange behavior: whenever I receive or make (as soon as I press the "dial" button) a call, the phone screen goes black and the phone "hangs", and cannot be unlocked neither pressing the physical power button nor trying to unlock it with the fingerprint sensor. It automatically unlocks, with the screen popping back to life as soon as the call ends (because I have no control of the phone, this happens because the other party hangs up or if I get the busy tone). However the phone seems to be somewhat alive, because it's ringing/vibrating and my smartband is receiving correctly the call notification; moreover, pressing the power button stops the ringing as intended, and trying to unlock with fingerprints will produce the vibration feedback.

I have no idea about what's going on nor how to debug the issue. Here are some other elements that may give hints:

• the phone is running Android 10. I don't think it's relevant, but it's a Mi A2 Lite
• I haven't updated simple-dialer recently, it's running the same version installed from Fdroid repository since its release which worked like a charm up to this morning. Just in case, I tried both to uninstall and install again, and to install a previous version, but nothing changes
• I tried using other two open source phone apps (namely Welefon and Koler) and neither of the two has any issue, so I suspect it's something specific for simple-dialer
• the only thing that happened yesterday is that I applied a series of updates from the Google Play Store. Most of them were very specific apps that have nothing to do with the dialer, the only suspect ones could be the System WebView and the Carrier Services

Let me know if any more information is needed.

[wiselynx]

Looks like I managed to solve the problem, I'll report what I did for future reference should other users experience the same issue. I simply went in the installed apps list, opened the Carrier Service page, and cleared the cached data. After that, the odd behavior disappeared.