Comment by lopkeny12ko
2 years ago
Funny, because I have the opposite problem. My Pixel dials 911 out of random and I always have to race to disconnect the call.
Just last night my Pixel Watch started ringing out of random while I was eating dinner and it said it was dialing 911. I saw a phone call pop up on my Pixel 6 phone but fortunately canceled it before it connected. My watch didn't even tell me why it dialed 911, and once I disconnected the call it just disappeared from my watch. Totally useless!
There should really be a hard-to-accidentally-accept confirmation dialog for any kind of automated emergency dial feature. This is ridiculous because this is probably the 3rd time this has happened to me.
Jeez - can't dial 911, randomly dials 911.
I don't understand why these devices can't even do the most core feature of a phone properly.
This will sound crass but the development teams (right up to CEO's) should be dragged out to the gallows and flogged.
If it was my product I would have made damn sure the 911 experience was perfect before shipping, and not rested for a minute until any bugs were solidly quashed - up to and including recalling all sold units and overhauling the flakey architecture if needed.
This is life safety we're talking about, not only for their users but also everyone else impacted by their blatent abuse of the emergency services system. Would we tolerate bridges that collapsed with equally ambivalent consequences for those who engineered them?
In any other field, engineers would be held responsible and after so many "mistakes" they would lose their license.
Software engineers will fight tooth and nails to keep their privilege is being called engineers whilst having none of the responsibility when it comes to the harm they're causing.
Really? Who lost their engineering license from Firestone tires? Toyota gas pedals? Hasbro easy-bake oven? Graco high chairs?
Stop trotting out the same baseless comment over and over.
4 replies →
In most fields with “real engineers” do they also get told by management to ship things broken and/or with arbitrary deadlines, or do they have the ability to push back on things, with some legal recourse or means to avoid the threat of losing their jobs if they say no to something, that software engineers lack?
I don’t think things will change until corporate management changes (via being forced to, or otherwise).
If it was my product I would have made damn sure the 911 experience was perfect before shipping
For what it's worth, every telco switch upgrade I performed ages ago, early days of GSM the first number I tested was 911. I made sure the dispatcher could hear me. I don't know whats going on with the phone development side of things. That seems like a QA and customer feedback review problem. It probably also does not help that wireless vendors are slow/hesitant to update phones. There is a fear of bricking phones and customer support nightmares their words, not mine. I could flash update a phone over the air but this was in the 90's. No idea what that process looks like now. I assume they stage an update on a CDN after hopefully testing it extensively. Do all cell phones have two boot partitions in the event the upgrade process is sub-optimal(c)?
I can hallucinate couple different explanations for that:
etc.
One more I'd throw on the list is a growing trend in our field of shipping buggy products with the expectation we'll fix them later via updates. It's a terrible drug the internet enabled.
The ironic thing is personally I only upgrade my phone every 5+ years and would be totally happy with longer development cycles.
Yes, I think the real problem is #2.
The only reliable way to test 911 features is a test lab, to which the average engineer doesn't have access to. On top of that, calling 911 isn't exactly as placing a normal call - so the only way to test is... to call 911.
Again, a test lab should help towards these things, but I doubt Google has one accessible to the average engineer working on the dialer. Plus, they most likely don't have a way to automatically test these changes - or they might happen as part of other "features" (remember the Microsoft Teams bug that caused similar issues?).
In the end, the smarter our smartphones become - the dumber they are at doing the one single thing they were initially meant to do - get help in case of an emergency.
45 replies →
> 911 is handled too specially AFAIK there is some special functionality to report location directly to emergency services when calling to speed up emergency handling
but if that would be my implementation I would track call in some very simple way and if that's second or third try to call 911 within hour then handle it as ordinary call without that extra functionality as a safeguard
Also possible that bug is due to poor handling of mobile network error so no functionality is lost, just a UI issue. Or there is a bug, but the frequency is much lower than mobile network failure rate so low priority.
Yeah, 911 calls should be implemented in an entirely different hardware subsystem, just like the flight control system of an airplane doesn't run on the same hardware as the entertainment systems.
My bet is on Google doesn't give a shit. The pixel 4a is a second tier device with constant ui crashes, glitches and design obviously not made for it.
> If it was my product I would have made damn sure the 911 experience was perfect before shipping
not absolving Google, but this is easier said than done
> Jeez - can't dial 911, randomly dials 911.
There's enough 911 calls for everyone, they're just not distributed equally.
How are you doing this? Dialing an emergency has never happened to me by accident on Android or iOS.
It has happened to me many times on office phones where you need to use 9 to route your call. And you learn to just stay on the call if you dial me mistake because they will call back if you disconnect and telling them it was a mistake if much quicker. They must deal with it all the time
Happened to me twice with an iPhone. Both times I triggered it when the phone was lagging for some reason (eg it got too hot and throttled down). I guess iOS doesn't track the delay between button presses properly when it's overloaded. I was able to cancel the call in time, but it's a horrifying seeing the timer go down while mashing the non-responsive stop button.
Sounds about right, considering how many accidental screenshots I've taken during lag when I press the two buttons involved in the combo a few seconds apart.
After I retired my last smartphone, a Nokia something, the same thing happened. I used it purely as a mp3 player when walking the woods and it would randomly call the emergency line (not 911 in my country)
I barely could cancel the call before it went through as of course I was walking and had headphones in.
I figured it had something to do with a button... it got more annoying over time so what I did to fix it was: change the emergency number to my girlfriend`s
> How are you doing this? Dialing an emergency has never happened to me by accident on Android or iOS.
I wish I could tell you. As far as I can tell, there's no way, either on my watch or my phone, to figure out retroactively why it automatically dialed 911.
I know the Emergency SOS feature allows dialing 911 with some sequence of power button presses, but I don't think I was pressing the crown on my watch at the time.
I had my Pixel 5 dial 911 once at random. There was a tiny piece of debris stuck in the power button that triggered the call. A couple of blasts with a compressor and this hasn't happened since.
1 reply →
I had this happen with my iPhone a few years ago. Basically there’s a setting where some combination of the side buttons pressed together calls 911. I was in a borrowed car and the cup holder was just the right width to do this when I hit a bump.
The very nice 911 operator told me it happened all the time. After the second time it happened I tracked down the setting to disable it.
In iOS 17, there are two related settings for this is under Settings Emergency SOS.
on android, pressing power five times calls 911.
you can turn it off in settings. it's a good idea but sadly too easy to do if you're trying to turn the volume down instead for example.
also, even if it's awkward, stay on the line and explain. they usually appreciate it.
Some 911 operator online once mentioned that most of the calls they get are “butt dials.”
And then when I called months back I got an answering machine and waited what felt like an eternity (was one minute) to be routed to someone who then routed me elsewhere after determining what my needs were.
I think a confirmation dialog would defeat the purpose of an auto dial here — you need the auto dial because you have been incapacitated.
Apple's approach is to give you some fixed amount of time to cancel before it auto-dials an emergency number.
Pixel does the same, but the amount of times it triggers automatically can be different...
This happened to me, it was the emergency shortcut on the phone. Press the power button four times and it calls the police. You can turn it off. It was the button that kept triggering rather than a software fault.
When you hold down the power button, there is a big red emergency button beside the restart button. I've gotten pretty close to accidentally pressing it.
Turn off Emergency SOS on your watch and phone.
My phone went from a hobby to a tool when I switched to iphone. Don't regret it at all.
Ah, 911 Georg