A method and apparatus for automatic delivery of a phone call on an electronic device regardless of whether other tasks are running on the operating system. A separate background task ("thread"), independent of the operating system, enables telephony functionality without regard to the mode of a graphical user interface. The background task is always active and functions to respond to an incoming call even if the user is in a graphical user interface window that requires some input from the user (e.g. the graphical user interface is blocked).