In my Ionic app (with Angular), I give the ability to the users to call a phone number (using the Call Number Plugin), in 2 different ways:

1. Either publicly
2. Or anonymously to mask their phone number, by prepending #31# to the callee phone number

No issue for the first case.

However, it doesn't work anymore for the second mode (dialer doesn't even open) whereas it used to work for a long time without any problem.

I also tried from a plain window.open:

window.open('tel:#31#XXXXXXXX')
window.open('tel://#31#XXXXXXXX')
window.open('tel:%2331%23XXXXXXXX')
window.open('tel://%2331%23XXXXXXXX')

but still doesn't work, either on iOS or Android.

Strangely, this does work from Safari on iOS (not tested on Android):

<a href='tel://#31#XXXXXXXX'>Call me</a>

although I have to use tel:// and not tel: to avoid having the following exception: Failed to launch 'tel:#31#XXXXXXXX' because the scheme does not have a registered handler.

Has anyone ever experienced the same issue?