Comment by numpad0
2 years ago
I can hallucinate couple different explanations for that:
- Modern software is way too overcomplicated to take seriously.
- 911 is handled too specially, leading to oversights by implementers.
- Feature importance to you has nothing to do with implementation difficulties.
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.
> Again, a test lab should help towards these things, but I doubt Google has one accessible to the average engineer working on the dialer.
And why not? It seems like the real real problem is #4: Management doesn't take seriously people's need to reach emergency services because it's not a profit center.
A test lab is a room that is completely isolated from the outside (and in a way that the RF doesn't leak outside of the premises) where you can do these kind of experiments.
Considering the amount of teams working on the Google Dialer, and the fact that they might be distributed across multiple cities / countries - this sounds very expensive.
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Even the dimmest view of management should expect them to care about extremely bad PR.
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> the only way to test is... to call 911
You should be able to use 933 to test emergency services. https://support.bandwidth.com/hc/en-us/articles/210291778-Th...
Completely tangential to testing that the service connects: I have a young child and we've done practice "what do you do in an emergency" things, but are there any "fake 911" type services where a young child can call to practice a 911 call, so they can experience how the operator will talk to them, so in a real emergency it would be a bit less jarring?
Is that only a service that Bandwidth.com offers or would it work on a regular cell network?
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I've been wondering how to test this, thank you
Okay, but that's not going through the same paths of a 911 call, is it?
And by that I mean the emergency mode of the modems
You don't need a full concert hall to test 911, the simplest LTE test equipment can be just couple sandwiches big. They're also not expensive at Google scale. It does concern me that there were anecdotal posts that read to me like that, developing firmwares and not blatantly violating basic assumptions and principles and core premises of Google MDM cannot occur simultaneously. If I somehow had to, I would bet that that to be on the path to the root cause. I mean, a lot of software jockeys have to be explained that IP address isn't assigned to a CPU socket.
You need a special room as well - you can't accept that someone near your building might end up having his 911 call routed through your test infrastructure.
Alternatively, I think you can somehow connect the device antenna to your equipment, so that the signal doesn't even have to be transmitted over the air (or at the scale of a femtocell). Still, rather "expensive" to setup in multiple locations for just a team that develops a dialer.
Additionally, you'd have to test this across multiple OS versions, and devices. Still doable, but most likely not incentivized by the managers at Google
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I believe some places you provide emergency services the number you will be calling from to test, so they can handle it appropriately.
Ultimately with a system like 911, you will always have to do final testing on the real deal. Because this is just too serious to get wrong.
How does every other phone manufacturer do it then?
> 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.