Soft phones are better than webphones because soft phones use SIP...an hour long discussion ensues. Sigh.

Yes

but i'ts a shame that smartphones dont Support SIP natively. Apps like Zoiper don't work reliable.

Give BRIA a try. It’s not too bad.

@heyheni Android does. Dialer (Phone) -> Settings -> Calling Accounts

@saucyatom nice to know! looking to switch from my aging iphone 6s anyway.

@heyheni Constant power usage (wakelock) is a downside of SIP though, but it's the nature of the protocol. There is a setting to "Receive incoming calls" with a warning that it uses more battery life.

I got a third party VOIP app which doesn't provide SIP credentials, but gets me a local number and 100 minutes for free for almost worldwide calling. It uses a push system and doesn't affect battery life at all if you don't use it, which is not possible with SIP, unfortunately.

Project idea: An interesting take on this could be to have a SIP client running on a server that wakes up the client on the phone with a push notification when a call is coming on. To reduce latency the phone should have a direct SIP connection as well and not relay everything trough the server. For this, the provider must allow you two login on two different SIP clients at the same time.
Limitation: Must be self hosted, otherwise you would have to upload SIP credentials to a third party. Dangerous.

@saucyatom cool idea, try it 👍

@heyheni Whenever I find the time to tinker around with that. So after dealing with a 100 other side projects (haha).

@heyheni Also it's not something I'm in any way familiar with (building a SIP client, push services, Android development in general), so if anyone wants to grab the idea and try to work it out, go for it. Monetization will be difficult because the privacy and security concerns require it to be self hosted, which severely limits the audience - unless the SIP provider would issue two sets of credentials, where one (for the server) is only allowed to receive calls (to prevent fraud), but I don't think that a single one does that (on a single number), since it has no use case without this new system.

I guess it's a lot of work for little gain. Maybe the battery drain (of normal SIP) isn't even so bad to start with, so that should be checked first.