Small Call (for Android)

Small Call is an Android app designed to minimize app-interruption on Android when you receive a call or text?a? good idea, because some apps may not recover well from an incoming call or text message when they are running in the background. Small Call does not provide much benefit over the native Android OS capabilities overall, but if you have a particular background-running app that becomes unstable when you get a call or text, you may want to check out Small Call (.99 GooglePlay).

Configuring
After installing and launching the app, you get a couple of settings choices. A toggle slide switch lets you enable or disable Small Call. You can also adjust the opacity of a pop-up menu that the app displays?that is, the amount of contrast between the menu's icons and the background.

You can tell Small Call to prevent calls and texts from interrupting the main task you're doing with your device in a few ways. For incoming calls, you can choose to simply reject the call with no further action, send the call to voicemail, or pick up and then hang up on the caller?a rather extreme solution. These actions are performed via a pop-up overlay that Small Call displays when a call or text is received.

You can also opt to use Small Call to handle incoming texts. When you receive a text, the Small Call pop up overlay shows you the message, tells you who the message is from, and lets you ignore it or shoot a text back.? The default text message to send is set as "Can't talk now, what's up?" which encourages the person contacting you to text you again, further disturbing you when you don't want to be interrupted in the first place. Fortunately, you can set a custom message up to 250 characters.

Testing
I tested Small Call on my rather dated?Droid 3?with three apps running: a game called Stand o' Food 3, Spotify, and a stopwatch app.? I also tested writing a text message while getting an incoming call with Small Call enabled. I set Small Call to send ignored calls to VM.

With Small Call enabled and the Stand o' Food game running, I saw the app's overlay screen give me the option to Ignore, Text, or Answer. As was always the case before I installed Small Call, my game was interrupted with Small Call handling the call. My call was sent to VM as I configured the app to do. Although my game was interrupted, at least the game app was still open so I could quickly re-launch the game, but that's always the case.

Next I ran a critical stopwatch app I use to test device performance with Small Call enabled. This was where I find value in Small Call. Normally, when I get a call with my stopwatch app running, I get the Android phone call interface, which blocks my view of the stopwatch and sometimes stops the countdown. With Small Call handling incoming calls, I instead get a little pop-up window at the bottom of my screen so I can handle the call and keep an eye on my countdown.

With Spotify streaming music and Small Call enabled, I did get the Small Call screen and could choose to ignore the call and send it to VM. Enabling Small Call made no difference while using Spotify, because I can handle the calls pretty much the same way natively with Android and Spotify will go back to streaming music with or without Small Call.

Next, I tested what happens when I'm in the middle of writing a text message and the phone rings. This is one of the most annoying interruptions with an Android phone, because you are almost always guaranteed to lose your place typing the message (although my phone natively does a good job of saving a draft message, instantly). When I received an inbound call in the middle of typing a text, the Small Call pop-up overlay appeared, and I was able to ignore the call and send it to voicemail. The message was saved as a draft and I was able to go to creating the text. Again though, Android handles interrupted text messages like that, anyway.

Good Perhaps for Some Apps
Since I last tested Small Call, the developers have done a good job of fixing some bugs that caused the app to crash every once in a while. The value of Small Call really depends on the apps you have running in the background. With Spotify Small Call makes no difference, but for my stopwatch app, Small Call helps. If you run an app that acts flaky whenever you receive a call or text, give Small Call a try.

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