Tailscale interferes with WiFi calling on Google Fi

I’m using Google Fi. I don’t get cell service inside my house, so my phone switches to WiFi calling when I’m home. I don’t get a lot of phone calls, but I do get some occasionally. I started using Tailscale about a month ago, and this past weekend I noticed that I couldn’t make or receive phone calls if Tailscale was enabled. When I stopped the Tailscale service on my phone, phone calls worked again.

Note: I’m not connected to an exit node. I just have the Tailscale service on so that some of my apps can connect to other Tailscale-enabled devices as if they were all together on a local network.

Is there any way to get Tailscale to play nice? It would be awesome if there was a dropdown list where we could enable/disable Tailscale on a per-app basis. I could even make it work if Tailscale had a Tasker plug-in so I could automatically turn the service on/off based on WiFi connection.

Tailscale has just been updated to have its intents enable and disable the connection, similar to how Openvpn works with Tasker. I couldn’t figure it out yet, but hopefully someone will soon.

Do you run any sort of DNS blocking on your tailnet? Like pi-hole, AdGuard etc.

If that’s your issue, I would recommend keeping tailscale off on your phone unless you need your phone to access a server that you own / control somewhere.

Remember, tailscale is a VPN service, but it’s not a VPN in the same way that Mullvad is a VPN. Tailscale lets you connect privately to different servers that you own, but it doesn’t protect your general internet traffic in the same way that a typical commercial VPN service like Mullvad (or some other VPN service) would.

I hope that makes sense.

tasker could turn vpn on or off based on wifi network

https://taskernet.com/shares/?user=AS35m8lTIGinO1d2BUoFJfqTug/ZsKslTokZYzG0tJ4rHL224ZKcqBPZfmC41d9JXIbfwJs%3D&id=Profile:VPN+When+Not+Home

I’m aware of what TS does and how it works. I’m hoping for an automatic or background solution. Manually toggling TS every time I leave/arrive home is a crappy solution.

That looks like it uses Wireguard intents to connect/disconnect Wireguard.

To elaborate, TS used to interfere with Android Auto, which it shouldn’t do because AA isn’t trying to go anywhere–it’s just a phone-to-car connection. TS made some background modification to exclude AA from TS traffic and now AA works fine while TS is enabled. It would be nice if they would expose that bit of code in a general fashion so that users could select other apps to exclude from TS’s interruptions.

similar to this? https://www.reddit.com/r/Tailscale/comments/pe20tv/connectdisconnect\_tailscale\_via\_appintents\_or/

ah i see, I used another pre-made tasker profile that worked with tailscale so I’m sure you can build a custom task.

Fair points. I’m not sure what phone OS you’re on, but google assistant (or similar) may have some kind of ability for something like, “when i’m home, turn off tailscale” based on GPS location / when you connect to home wifi, etc.

Well that’s incredibly frustrating to read.