I spotted the following telephone number problem on my IPHONE 6 with latest SD-version :

Not knowing a great deal about German phone numbers, though, I hope we wouldn't be breaking anything by doing that.

As it happens, we are given telephone numbers for German airfields digitally so we can probably help with this. Many of the telephone numbers we are given do not have the +49 international prefix so we add it. If when adding it, it would also be helpful if we then removed a leading zero, we can do that.

PS: The issue is not about leading zeros, it's about the preceding zero of the national notation remaining in the international E.123 notation.

The call did not work, that is how I noticed the issue a few weeks ago … It's a common issue with phone numbers at least in Austria and Germany while France, Switzerland and the Netherlands seems to be fine. I've never had the opposite issue, i.e., a call not working due to a missing zero after the country prefix, however, that issue might exist too. Yeah, ITU recommendations are not mandatory, that is how the ITU works, and there has been no need to make them mandatory because they are widely adopted, including E.164, also due to ITU's status as a UN organization.

Phone numbers written in the international format with country code are not valid if the zero from the national prefix remains. An example is the telephone number for EDTF in Germany, at least if you use iOS:

+49 0761 509626 is not valid, +49 761 509626 is valid. (The German phone number is 0761 509626.)