Who’d have thought Google will pull the Click to Call feature from Chrome on all platforms such as Windows, Mac, Linux (and Android), when it was so useful to make calls by clicking phone numbers on web pages? Well, the change is apparently live in Chrome Canary on Windows, presuming it won’t affect Android.
Chrome Click to Call
Chrome introduced the Click to call feature sometime back.
When you click on a tel link or phone number on a web page, the Click to Call UI opens and asks you to choose your phone or an app. When you select mobile, a notification will be sent to the phone and the dialer opens the number filled in to call.
For Click to Call to work, you need to sign in to Chrome on both devices.
Chrome to disable click to call on all platforms
Google has decided to disable click-to-call on all platforms in Chrome.
However, a flag has been made available for those who want to re-enable it.
The change has been already made to Chrome Canary on Windows where clicking a phone number no longer shows click to call UI, instead, it shows a dialog to ‘open pick an App’, which other web browsers like Edge do.
The dialog looks like this:
“Open pick an App?
exmaple.com wants to open this application”
When you select the “Open Pick an App” option rather than cancel, you’ll be prompted to choose an app to open the tel link.
There were reports since the C2C introduction where some users who have installed Click-to-call or DialPad and other similar extensions in Chrome found the feature pretty annoying.
Re-enable the Click to Call feature in Chrome
- Launch Chrome browser
- Visit chrome://flags in the address bar
- Find the Click to Call flag,
- Select Enabled and restart the browser.
Note: The flag is also available in Chrome for Android in the Canary.
With no details available in the bug report, we can’t confirm whether this is an experiment or they actually removing the Click to Call feature.
We’ll know more when the change lands in the Chrome release.
What’s your take on this? Let us know in the comments below.
