termux-telephony-call only works with termux running in the foreground?

[johnnys66]

Hello,

I can only use termux-telephony-call with termux running in the foreground. Running it from crontab or from a remote shell doesn't make any calls if termux is running in the background.
I understand that the use case can be weird but I use a sim card in a phone acting as an sms gateway. To maintain the plan I need to make a phone call every once in a while. My idea was to set a cron job to make a phone call to my phone, then I could answer and disconnect after a few seconds. This way I wouldn't need to be physically by the phone to make the call.
I could disable screen lock and keep the app running in the foreground but if the phone restarts then I'm stuck.
Is this by design?

Termux v0.118 from f-droid
Phone redmi 4X

Tks