I dropped my Pixel in water and since it had previously cracked, it had lost the waterproofing. The water apparently shorted the power button and the screen. That was a fun night when the dead phone woke up and started dialling 112 repeatedly and there was nothing I could do short of smashing the damn thing with a hammer to stop it.
Every electronic device needs to have a physical disconnect for the power supply. It should be considered a severe enough fault to warrant not getting market approval if this is missing.
I had a similar issue - the glass on the back of my Pixel (5 I think?) cracked right by the power button, and it seemed to be kind of OK but I got a new phone anyway, but left the old one in my glove box of my car where I used it for the bluetooth entry to the parking garage at work (and because re-enrolling was a pain). It didn't have the sim setup or wifi enabled so didn't think much of it.
This worked fine for a few months, just turning it on at the gate then off afterwards and threw it back in the glove compartment.
Until one day driving home I heard a weird beeping, then a voice from the glove box asking what my emergency was. I shouted back pulling over and fumbling to get the phone out, and told the responder my phone had called them by itself. I was a little surprised as I thought every call, even abandoned, had to be followed up on, in case there was coercion? But I guess not if you just blame the phone. I guess the buttons had shorted to turn the phone on, then ended up going into the emergency call? I couldn't even turn it off at that point as the power button refused to work and the digitizer was partially non-functional.
A bit of a pain, and a (hopefully small) waste of an emergency responder's time, but I can see this sort of thing being relatively common - in "normal use" I've had my phone somehow end up on the emergency call menu, just being jostled and unlocked or fat fingering the wrong buttons, so wouldn't be surprised if unneeded emergency calls are relatively common on even fully functional devices.
But I guess that cost is worth paying if it's more convenient and quick when there is an emergency?
In Germany it is not possible to call emergency without an active SIM (if it is PIN protected, the PIN has to be entered before). This has been deliberately disabled since February 2009 because there were too many anonymous calls for fun or (how idiotic!) to test if a secondhand phone still works.
That sounds kind of insane; the whole point of being able to call emergency numbers in the UK on a phone without a SIM, and/or without unlocking it, is that it's an emergency.
The solution you describe sounds like a potentially dangerous technical solution to a cultural problem. I don't hear of people phoning 999 in the UK to test a second hand phone works, or for fun.
What happens in the case where the only phone to hand happens to be someone else's and said person is incapacitated, or otherwise incapable of unlocking it?
It's not going to do something like require phones use clips again to hold the back on and hold the battery inside the housing. Apple's self-service repair program might already qualify.
We do have a useful invention called the screw. With every phone phablet sized nowadays there isn't a valid argument that they don't have room for waterproofed fasteners.
A 1-2 hour process which includes heating to soften glue, high potential of damaging internal components, or high potential of cracking some piece of glass is not "Screws are how in fact one accesses the battery in an iPhone."
> “A portable battery should be considered to be removable by the end-user when it can be removed with the use of commercially available tools and without requiring the use of specialised tools, unless they are provided free of charge, or proprietary tools, thermal energy or solvents to disassemble it.”
possibly, yes, it’s certainly an argument that could be made in court. However the battery itself can be removed without those. It’s the rear glass that can’t (currently, who knows in 4 years).
Sounds hair splitting I know, but court cases are won & lost on less.
This post is misleading. Have you watched a YouTube video of what it takes to replace a battery in a modern, advanced mobile phone? Woah, that is a lot of glue. And, it is very tricky to do it right.
I also had a pixel begin to boot then make 911 calls upon getting moisture in it. I damaged the sim slot prying it out so it wouldn't dial 911 any more.
I figured my experience was a freak occurrence - how is this a (n=2) failure mode when getting wet!?
>> That was a fun night when the dead phone woke up and started dialling 112 repeatedly and there was nothing I could do short of smashing the damn thing with a hammer to stop it.
> Just put it in a Faraday cage. Problem solved.
Even if I don't have a hammer handy, I could probably find something in the middle of the night to smash the thing. A Faraday cage on the other hand...
Do I need to turn on the microwave with the phone inside it? This is an honest question because I don't know anything about microwave signals (I could google/research), but my instinct tells me I probably shouldn't turn on the microwave with the phone inside it, though I don't know for sure what will happen (explode?)
I wonder if it shouldn't be a thing we keep handy. Like a foldable Faraday cage (bag ?) big enough to fit a laptop that can be whiped out in case of emergency.
They definitely make Faraday cage bags that are about as thick as heavy mil trash bags. Depending on the issue (EMP?) you may need to double bag if primitive YouTube experiments are anything to go by (basically, does the phone ring/radio receive once it's enclosed).
They did quite well for 3G and even 4G which didn't have as many above 2.4GHz , but after 4GLTE, 5G has added a lot of mid-bands between 2.6-6GHz. Those tend to leak more since they have shorter wavelengths than microwaves are built around 2.4GHz. Some of them are only used in a few countries, but n2 & n77 are widely used by ATT.
Usually. You can check by putting your phone in and closing the door while looking at the signal strength meter. It should go without saying don’t turn the microwave oven on with your expensive electronics inside. If you get decent reception in the closed oven, you need a new one.
Definitely works to kill reception forever if you power up the microwave for a couple of minutes…
No, they used it as acoustic insulation for the microphones and optical insulation for the cameras. The signal blocking, if any, is just a bonus, but isn't to be relied upon.
I had to disable the shortcuts on my iPhone because the toddler had discovered hold to dial 911 and talk to the nice lady.
Luckily I caught it before it became like the other case I heard of, where a kid learned he could get a fire truck to visit anytime he was bored and had a phone.
Same has happened here with our 2-year old, except we didn't get to it in time and have had the fire department show up on more than one occasion before we figured out what was happening.
There were also a handful of times we could hear a voice coming through the wife's phone where we narrowly avoided a few more visits.
This was all before we discovered how she actually calling 911. It's shocking to me Google didn't make more of a deal about this new "feature" when they rolled it out.
This definitely should have been opt-IN, not opt-out. Sure smells like a classic example of tech PMs making idealistic decisions that affect people in the real world without thinking through all of the consequences.
I start dialing 911 on my iphone when I think I’m turning the volume up but it doesn’t seem to be getting louder. Turns out I pressed the lock button N times and it starts dialing.
Years of iphone and I’m still not quick at blindly figuring out which set of buttons I’m touching.
> Luckily I caught it before it became like the other case I heard of, where a kid learned he could get a fire truck to visit anytime he was bored and had a phone.
Reminds me of the kid's book where a young girl (kindergarten age) really has to use the bathroom but can't find it so she calls 911 because she was taught "call 911 if and only if there is an emergency".
This is anecdotal but the same exact thing (albeit with an Apple Watch vs. Android) happened to me a few days ago- I had forgotten to turn on the watch's water mode before going in the water. After about like 5 minutes in the pool it started calling 911 for a medical emergency. My watch ended up calling 911 about 3 times (it probably tried to call them about 5 more times but I ended up taking it off in time to prevent those calls- since it wasn't responding to my inputs at all). I also got a call from the Sheriff's office a little bit later and had to sheepishly explain that my watch was spam calling 911.
Still unsure what happened with it exactly, but whatever was triggering it to do this seemed to not simply be due to water on the screen since it tried to call 911 again even when I put the watch back on hours later after it had dried. I have since power cycled it a few times and let it run out of battery and it hasn't tried getting me arrested for spoof calling 911 again, so that's promising.
I was swimming in a local lake last summer when I heard a faint voice from my watch. I look and it had unhelpfully called 911 and I was being asked what my emergency was.
These are not the same category of product in the same way that a smartphone and a rotary phone are not the same category of product, despite have words in their name in common.
It sure doesn't, and for me that's a point against.
The continuous monitoring of a bunch of my health indicators is quite helpful when trying to determine how much more quickly than baseline the medication I'm on is trying to kill me.
Possibly related: I've noticed that when I'm in humid weather and I stick my phone into a damp pocket, it basically monkey-tests until I pull it back out again. Flashlight might be on, string of gibberish might be queued up on a text message, etc.
I'm normally really good about locking the screen when I'm done, but something with fingerprint or face recognition or lock screen quick actions behaves poorly.
> but something with fingerprint or face recognition or lock screen quick actions behaves poorly
Maybe I'm not crazy. Twice in the past couple weeks, my phone has seemingly unlocked itself in my pocket and I suspected it was to do with moisture/sweat, but dismissed it as unlikely.
In the first instance, it emergency dialed. I had just hung up the phone and put it away, so I thought I hadn't secured it.
In the second instance, I hadn't touched my phone in several minutes when suddenly my podcadt was overlaid with a demo video from an executive at my company which had opened in Teams. I closed out of that and discovered an unsent text to my wife filled with gibberish and a dozen image attachments.
I have a swipe and fingerprint enabled. My best guess is the mosture is registering my leg through the pocket and swiping it unlocked in an infinite monkeys scenario. I switched to password only for my walks now and haven't had an issue since.
Sometimes brushing against the fingerprint sensor (with the proper finger) is enough to unlock the phone. It might happen when you put your phone back in your pocket, then it's pure chaos
Wow this has happened to me more in the past few months than in the previous decade of iPhone ownership.
I received a call with my Mom, my emergency contact, because somehow my phone had pinged her or dialed her as an emergency.
Other times I pull out my phone and also see that it was doing something. Earlier today I was using google maps in a new city, I put my phone back in my pocket and when I pulled it out a few minutes later I was on an "add a new place to the map" or "mark a new place" flow.
After an accidental emergency call, discovered the cause of this was the "tap to turn on screen" feature -- and my leg was tapping it through my pocket. (On my phone, there was no way to remove the emergency call button on the lock screen.)
Thank you! That explains the strange wakeups I get on the phone when I put it my pocket. Every time I think I am crazy “I remember turning the screen off” but then I get it out later and it is on and has the camera app active.
I remember having an issue with a Nexus that I had a while back. I had a hard time getting the screen to turn on and stay on. Turns out, I had misapplied the screen protector and the proximity sensor was thinking that it was in a situation which it shouldn't turn on.
While it was my own doing, I can see many people having that problem to the point where Android turned off the functionality. Multiple support calls, requests to return "defective" phones, etc.
But yeah, I currently have the same issue. If my current Pixel 3a is in my slightly damp pocket, it will have tried to "monkey touching" as the post above called it.
Samsung devices appear to use the camera and/or the proximity sensor to display a "Your phone appears to be in a dark place, slide to unlock".
Unfortunately it seems easy to unlock that as well.
The biggest problems I have with this are related to the "raise to wake" and "tap to wake" features that seem to be enabled by default on all the phones I've tried including iOS devices. I think on Pixel it was called "pick up to check phone" or something else like that. Turning these off drastically reduces the number of times the phone turns on in my pocket because the power button becomes the only way to activate the screen.
On Samsung phones you additionally have to turn off a setting under Always-On display so that widgets are turned off and/or cannot receive touches, such as the music app etc.
This was my frustration with the Pixel 4 as well. So many random things done on my phone, including Amazon 1 Click purchases or random emails about to be sent, etc. All because the stupid thing somehow decides that the screen should be enabled in my pocket. However, if I'm making a call with the phone up to my ear and move it to look at it..."no screen for you!"
Don't believe it's only a phone thing. My Lenovo Thinkpad touchpad goes crazy as soon as my fingers are humid, be it from hand washing or sweating (hello, summertime). For some reason it will jump wildly around and also keep a mousedown event like forever then nothing will help: wiping it dry or crazy tapping or anything. Reboot it and it will work again - until the next wet touch.
I've had the exact same experience with my last two touchpads - including the reboot requirement to fix. Even disabling and reenabling the touchpad after cleaning it doesn't always solve the issue.
I think this is a touchscreen thing. If I take my phone in the shower and put it in a place where water splashes on it during the shower, it does all sorts of random stuff. Have to remember to set it to locked or else I might text someone or delete an email.
I have an insane story where walking in my wet swim trunks opened Instagram and sent a weird selfie from my gallery to multiple people via DM. Rather awkward.
If the screen is facing your leg you can get the capacitive touch to trigger. I learned this while snowboarding so I would have my screen facing outward, of course that puts it at higher risk of smashing though.
It isn't just a problem with Android. I volunteer for a small fire department. We respond to about 500 calls a year. Since January I can think of three times the automatic crash detection on iOS devices has called us out by mistake.
1) A person left their phone on their car and it fell off. Being a small town one of the volunteers was able to find the owner and bring them the phone.
2) A gps location in the middle of a lake. The best we figure is one of the people on a jet ski or wake boarding.
3) Some people jumping on a trampoline.
Each of these means 2-6 volunteers responding from home to the station and then spending 30-60 minutes driving around in large trucks looking for non-existent emergencies. Each call also gets an ambulance staffed with career paramedics.
On the other hand someone's Apple watch did call us and we found he had fallen and gotten stuck down in some bushes and did need our help.
There is lots of promise, but also the tax payers are footing the bill for the false positives, not to mention the added risk to responders.
For everyone blaming modern tech: The only time police have ever come to my house from a 911 call was back in the 90s. Some combination of a noisy phone line and a broken 900MHz cordless phone managed to call 911 and they followed up. They said not to worry, it happens all the time and was a notable portion of their calls.
These types of false calls have been happening for a long, long time. We should get more data and fix the system for sure -- but this isn't a new dynamic and the historic baseline before smartphones isn't zero.
Back in 1996, I was living in Almaden Valley (South San Jose) and we had underground utilities. We also lived on top of an underground stream.
After a rainstorm, water got in and intermittently shorted out the phone line. It was clicking like crazy!
I was on my cool new Motorola StarTAC talking with Pacific Bell to report the problem. Then I heard a loud knock on the door: "San Jose Police. Open up!"
I asked the officers what the problem was and they said "We got a 911 call with no one on the line. We tried to call you back, but no one answered. So we had to come out and investigate."
I invited them in and said, "I think I know what happened." They followed me over to the landline speakerphone in the kitchen and listened to the clicking.
Then I explained, "You remember the old rotary dial phones? They worked by making and breaking the circuit, just like this clicking. Even if we all have touch-tone phones these days, the phone lines are still compatible with the rotary dial. So somewhere in the midst of all this clicking, there were nine fast clicks in a row, and then one click, and one more. And that dialed 911. Sorry about that!"
I have to register my building's alarm with the county and pay a fine after 3 false alarms, or not register and the police won't respond. I also pay an annual registration fee.
I wonder if too many "smart" false alarms will lead to similar regulation.
In my city, monitored alarms aren't worthwhile for non-commercial properties. For the police to respond, your alarm has to be registered, and registration requires authorized first responders with keys to confirm that an alarm is false or valid before police are called/dispatched.
Some alarm vendors will offer "video verification" which typically satisfies that requirement in most markets that require it. Many Alarm.com-based vendors (like Surety Home) can enable it on your system.
I’ve read through the city bylaw here, and there doesn’t seem to be any affordance to “video verification”. The only thing that’s easier with a professional company is that if you have a monitored alarm without security staff in the city, you must provide the police with contact info of two authorized keyholders, while you only need to give them the contact info of a single alarm company that’s capable of responding to alarms on a 24/7 basis.
The only notable exception I can see is that monitors of alarms at financial institutions are allowed to contact police directly without sending someone else to investigate first.
It generally feels like the city/police here has decided that alarms are not a thing for the police to deal with, unless it concerns banks.
Once I was tucking to pick up speed and I must have accidentally held the side button down in my pocket. I didn't notice anything had happened until I got a call back asking if I was okay. (I did hear the countdown alarm that plays, but misattributed it to a snowmobile or other equipment at the ski resort.)
The second time I was also skiing and did actually fall. I was unhurt but I guess going fast enough to trigger the call. Unfortunately I couldn't get myself situated enough (gloves, zippered pocket, super steep hill) to cancel before the call went through.
The dispatchers were great in both cases. Asked me a few questions to make sure nobody in the area needed help and nothing else happened.
> A gps location in the middle of a lake. The best we figure is one of the people on a jet ski or wake boarding
How do you rule out BUI/drowning? It would suck to be given up on. Is there ever any information indicating the call was placed by a device?
A classmate of mine accidentally drove into a lake and drowned when GPS/E911 conflict dispatched responders to the wrong location. It's not a perfect system to begin with, and made worse by automatic dialers undermining responder trust.
I hate Apple as much as any other large tech company, but 1/4 true emergency rate seems like a pretty good start in cases where a person's life may be at risk!
Emergency services in my city (the one you call via phone) have a "true emergency" rate of about 1 in 10 according to emergency personnel I talked to, so it is always a matter of balancing the false positive/false negative rate.
911 is not well funded in the majority of the US. In many rural areas, one false call that requires EMS sent out could cause another person with a legitimate call to wait a hour or more.
This conclusion doesn't follow, it only makes sense if they are 100% busy all the time. I volunteered in an emergency ambulance a little bit and most of the time we waited in the waiting station.
Another way to look at it - 1/4 of the time people who needed emergency responders had to wait because they were busy looking into false alarms.
Your position makes the assumption that the rest of the emergency services infrastructure is at maximum use at all times.
The OP was talking about a place where they use volunteers, so it's not likely that they're constantly in use.
While you are correct that seconds can sometimes matter, it's not always true. Not every emergency call is life-or-death. Not every emergency call even requires a response.
Imaging a hypothetical world where every call is a true emergency, and emergency services are at 100% utilization 100% of the time is arguing just for the sake of arguing.
I live in a place where emergency services is over-taxed. But I'd rather have actual lives saved with a certain number of false alarms than have people die because someone decided that perfection is the only option.
"1/4 of the time people who needed emergency responders had to wait because they were busy looking into false alarms."
That would be even better, as that would mean 3/4 of the alarms are hits/non false-positives. I argue that even a 1/4 hit rate, i.e. 3/4 false positive rate, is a good start.
I'm having an issue related to this right now actually. Some spec of dust or something must have gotten into the power button on my Pixel 4a, so very occasionally it'll jostle into such a position that every time I push the power button it registers as two presses. If I only press it once, it think I'm using the double-press shortcut to open the camera. This was mildly confusing the first few times it happened, but as I was trying to mess with it I triggered this emergency call shortcut (since it only requires 3 presses with this issue). Fortunately I noticed it the first time times it happened and was able to do the slide-to-cancel, so it avoided turning into a larger issue.
I've gotten it into a position where if this occurs I can blow near the power button which typically makes it go away for a day or so, but it was very scary walking around with the phone out before I understood the nature of the issue, because I wasn't sure if it would magically trigger the power button unprompted just sitting in my pocket. I've ordered a new phone (it was nearing time for an upgrade anyways) but I've yet to set it up, so I'm stuck with this for the time being.
I love Pixel phones, but stuff like this does seem to be a recurring issue. Sometimes my phone turns off and on again when I only press the power button once. Not a huge dealbreaker, just a pain to constantly have to think about.
I saw this happen to someone recently. Their phone was having other issues, so we were trying to reboot it, and Google changed which buttons you have to push to turn your phone off. You used to be able to just press the one button to turn the phone off, but now you have to press 2. So I think people might be pressing the power button a bunch of time now because they're trying to turn their phone off and don't realize you have to hold down 2 buttons now instead of one.
No, Google is not A/B testing the emergency dialer. What the previous commenter is referring to is a change in Android 12 where, by default, long-pressing the power button no longer brings up the power menu but rather the default Assistant app.
Not realizing that the way to bring up the power menu now is to either access it through Quick Settings or press the power + volume up buttons, the previous commenter's friend started pressing the power button multiple times. (Not blaming that friend, just summarizing what happened.)
Who thought the power button change is a good idea? Turning off your phone might be rare, but if it's needed, you shouldn't remember some weird gestures. Do people really want to talk to the stupid robot that fails to perform basic tasks, or is this a way to improve metrics?
Starting in Android 12 - hitting your power button 3 times in a row brings up the camera, five times in a row calls 911. Its not A/B testing thats for everyone.
iPhones have exactly the same feature, activated in almost the same way, except that it requires one fewer interactions with the device to trigger, and yet, there's no reporting about this happening too much with iPhones, nor was there any when the feature came out a few years ago.
Additionally, this doesn't seem to have been a problem when it rolled out on Pixel devices a year and a half ago, Pixels are certainly common enough for that to become a known issue.
Why is Android different? Why are third party Android devices seemingly so different?
> The funny thing is, Android 12 — and this easy emergency call feature — came out a year and a half ago. [...] the feature is only now hitting enough people to become a national problem. Google's Pixel devices get new Android updates immediately, but everyone else can take months or years to get new versions of Android [...]. When this landed on Pixel devices in 2021, it was immediately flagged as a problem by some people, with one Reddit post calling it "dangerous." Since then, there has been a steady stream of posts warning people about it.
It objectively has been a problem, and was a known issue, with Reddit posts warning others. There just weren't enough Pixels to cause this latest tsunami. That year-and-a-half delay from Samsung rolling out Android 12 was meant to be for testing - which apparently didn't catch everything.
I did read this but it doesn't feel convincing. People complain on Reddit about anything, and have complained about triggering this on iOS, and yet we don't get ArsTechnica (or the BBC, or other major news organisations) covering it as a widespread problem. There are plenty of Pixels, I'd expect enough to cause coverage if this was a substantial issue.
Increasing the accessibility of emergency calls is always going to be a tradeoff, so I'm not surprised there are accidental calls. However it strikes me as being significantly exacerbated by something about the phones it's rolling out to.
Seems obvious to me: Power is opposite Volume on Samsung Android phones, but not on Pixel. Easy to hit both buttons at once, and iPhone may do something special to detect that.
My Blackberry Android phone is the same, I remember having to train myself not to hit power when I first got it because my previous phone wasn't like this.
Apple seem to have lockscreen "keyboard mash detection" for macOS (where, if you are cleaning your keyboard and therefore mashing down keys as you swipe across them with a cloth, the OS will wake up and process the random inputs a while — until it detects that you've mashed 4+ function-row keys at once, at which point it'll just go back to sleep) so I wouldn't put it past them to have similar logic for iOS.
Ah! Good point. Yes on my iPhone if I press one or both volume buttons while pressing power 5 times it doesn't trigger, and yes on my Pixel the power button is above the volume button.
It seems strange that Samsung wouldn't do something to tackle this. Part of the point of Samsung and other OEMs taking ages to roll out new Android versions is that they're testing and ensuring compatibility.
Google made including the "emergency SOS" gesture a GMS requirement for Android 12 but left it up to OEMs to decide whether or not to enable it by default. I suspect this spike in emergency calls stems from a few factors:
1) Due to the general lag between Google pushing a new release out to AOSP and OEMs pushing out updates, many devices have only recently been updated to Android 12. OEMs with outsize market share pushing out updates will result in many more people - who probably don't know this gesture was added or how it's activated - accidentally triggering it.
2) Some OEMs may have flipped the switch in an OTA to turn the gesture from off by default to on by default.
I've had my Apple Watch detected me playing volley ball as having a serious fall, but it doesn't call until after a minute, and it makes quite a loud sound to notify the wearer that it's about to call.
It happens on iPhones and Watches as well, occasionally.
But if I remember correctly, the emergency call feature is something that is explicitly explained during the iOS/watchOS initial setup and/or upgrade procedure, at which point you can also elect to opt out, so at the very least, it's less of a surprise.
> Additionally, this doesn't seem to have been a problem when it rolled out on Pixel devices a year and a half ago, Pixels are certainly common enough for that to become a known issue.
It absolutely was a problem for me and I disabled it. I attach the phone to my car vent with an adapter and it slipped and when trying to adjust it called 911 twice while I was driving (couldn't pick up the first time).
How come such a critical shortcut be so unknown is a mystery to me. I can't imagine anyone ever used it intentionally.
Personally from my Samsung phone - it had enabled gestures by default. This allowed you to tap the screen a few times and it would present you with the lock screen which has the emergency call button. From personal experience - the phone will wake up and go into this menu if you sweat and have the phone in your pocket.
As an android user for 10+ years, and an avid one at that, this feature still managed to surprise me when my phone screen died in the office one day. I knew the phone was still working as the touch layer was still giving me feedback, but I was trying all the old tricks in the book, unaware that this feature is automatically switched on when you upgrade the phone. This was on a 2+ year old Samsung phone that released on a version prior to android 12
Android is usually pretty good at providing quick menu toggles for things like this, or indicating to you where/when a new feature has been added, but this was entirely hidden in sub-menus without me even realising. Unfortunate for the emergency dispatcher who had to listen to me frantically trying to understand what was happening with a broken phone screen.
I understand why this is an auto on feature for safety, but the lack of highlighting is really sub-par for the average user
> but this was entirely hidden in sub-menus without me even realising
For context in case it was missed in TFA: While Samsung has a settings page for the feature, some users report the page doesn't actually have an "off" switch. Some builds for the Galaxy S23 and S22 let you control things, like if emergency SOS should play a warning sound, but you can't actually turn off the power button shortcut.
I don't blame you for not realising, considering you were never notified, and likely not even given the option to turn it off.
I have a Samsung S20 FE and the touchscreen will occasionally become unresponsive. The way I found out Android has a panic 911 call function was by fiddling with the power button trying to reset my phone. Then the 911 countdown started and I couldn't cancel it because the touchscreen was still unresponsive :(
Literally happened to me on Friday. Samsung A52 and the screen was on but the backlight wouldn't come on, so it looked black in sunlight. Fiddled with it in frustration and it started dialing the emerency number and couldn't see the screen to cancel it. Very stressful, and a huge waste of emergency service time as they had to call back and double check (and take details).
This happened to me. Phone was in my pocket and just started making noise. I pull it out to see it had initiated an emergency call and I tried cancelling as fast as I could. Got a call back from dispatch to make sure I was ok. Kudos on them for their patience.
This was actually a large part of why I decided to buy a "flip" phone. With the screen closed, far fewer ways for me to have it activate while in my pocket.
This happened to me last month after I landed at Chicago O'Hare!
> Texting with 22911 (SMS/MMS)
> Chicago 911, we received a call from you, do you have a Police, Fire or medical emergency?
> 9-1-1 has ended this conversation. 9-1-1 will not receive additional replies to this message. Call 9-1-1 to report an emergency.
I didn't see any of this until I took the phone out of my pocket.
I don't think it was from pressing the power button five times. With the case I have on my S22 Ultra, it takes a fairly hard press. And with where I keep the phone in my pocket, it doesn't seem that it would have gotten pressed at all, much less five times. But maybe that was it after all.
Is there another way an Android phone can do an unexpected 911 call?
There's an emergency call option from the lockscreen (the one where you enter your pin/swipe if you don't just use your fingerprint) which I have set off a bunch of time in my pocket. Luckily I have my emergency contact set to my wife, so it calls her not emergency services. I _think_ I must accidentally put my phone in my pocket with the screen on, and then random movement gradually hits the few buttons needed.
Funny, I've never mistriggered this, but I constantly find my phone accidentally in airplane mode, with data turned off, with the torch on, etc.
Because Google doesn't understand the word "lock" in "lockscreen"
There's like a decade-old issue marked "won't fix", despite constant user complaints and non-Google manufacturers having a clear option for locking Quick Settings on the lock screen.
Just another papercut making me consider dropping the Pixel line and just buying something even cheaper than can run LineageOS. It's amazing the lengths Google goes to enact death by a million papercuts on their flagship OS.
Phones have and send IMEIs. These include a TAC [1] mapping directly to a phone model. The obvious solution would be to track false (accidental/misdial) calls, and if a phone model exceeds some metric (e.g. 5x the median), start fining/charging the manufacturer.
This would quickly cut down on these issues and if not, could at least provide funding to staff it.
Well, if the majority of accidental calls originate from the top n (n>0) manufactures it would be the most effective to address them. That's kinda how regulation works in many cases, see, e.g., privacy and safety enforcement in general.
Happened to me - phone in pocket, pressed button to increase volume, didn't seem to do much so I pressed it multiple times - but I was actually pressing the power button not the volume button. Cue 911 call.
This is one of many reasons we need an FDA for major software suppliers. The idea that a bug can be pushed to billions of devices with essentially no preventative oversight is bonkers to me. The only check (other than internal controls which may or may not work in a move fast and break things environment) is litigation years after the fact which may not be a deterrent anyways.
Imagine if pharmaceuticals worked the same way. Instead of requiring medical studies on small groups, any drug could just be released on the public. Who cares if it causes birth defects. Move fast and break things! Buyer beware. Once in a while you’d get a check for $20 in the mail after you find out you have some horrible incurable neurodegenerative disease.
This is quickly moving from annoyance to public nuisance to public safety emergency. Self-driving vehicle companies can push updates over the air that not only brick the vehicles, but endanger 3rd parties who never signed 95 page Terms and Conditions contracts. Obviously not all software needs to be subject to this regulation but some of it does.
If software had to go through the process of the FDA we'd be at the stage where VI was considered groundbreaking, and MS was considered a scrappy startup because IBM convinced regulators that anything but their business was dangerous.
The point is to have independent review. Drug review is notoriously slow and expensive because of the nature of the industry: bodies can take a long time to show results and cost money to recruit. Software testing can be done quickly and safely. We can run tests on software that would be considered unethical on humans.
The alternative is to move fast and break things which is maybe acceptable if that thing is a production database but far less charming if that thing is our emergency communications systems.
>The idea that a bug can be pushed to billions of devices with essentially no preventative oversight is bonkers to me.
Eh, in this case this is just a gap for the FCC who already regulates 911 and it's implementation that needs patching. The FCC can be absolutely brutal in their enforcement execution. It's just they move slow as rocks.
> Self-driving vehicle companies can push updates over the air that not only brick the vehicles, but endanger 3rd parties who never signed 95 page Terms and Conditions contracts.
The NHTSA regulates vehicles via the FMVSS (Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards). They are responsible for things as requiring e-braking, backup cameras and more. It's really their job and ability to crack down on self-driving vehicles and OTA in vehicles. They could very easily do it but the automakers of course throw tantrums and start getting their local senators to interfere.
Now, why doesn't anything happen? Well, it's part regulatory capture, part rotting federal government due to extremists.
Heh, a while back my phone went and died on me and I needed to get a new phone immediately so I could 2fa into stuff for work.
I went out and got the cheapest android phone I could find just temporarily. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but it was clear that whatever crummy little SoC they put in there was hardly capable of running the OS version they struck on it.
Often, the phone would lock up, but in a strange way. Only the rendering would freeze. There were several times an app would appear to completely lock up, and I would try to press the lock button of even restart it, but whatever app froze was still stuck on the screen, at least until it finally got going again and I realized that whatever frustrating tapping I was doing hit the emergency call button before the Lock Screen had even rendered. I had to explain to the operator about 5-6 times before I went and got a new phone.
I had this happen to me about a year ago when this first rolled out in the US on Pixel Devices. My phone's power button was broken and kept toggling (still is).
So, one day after this update, it ended up calling 911 on me and I had to explain no there's no problem, just my phone is garbage and called automatically. Did it a few times after that as well where I would have to scramble to cancel it.
I managed to make it to the menu described to turn off this feature. And gave up on fixing that device.
Really don't know what went on in the product owners minds to release this... There's plenty of people with finicky power buttons, children pressing things, general people pressing things hoping to make something work, accidental button presses, and so on...
Happened to me too, on a roller coaster funny enough.
I was at Busch Gardens in VA, riding their new coaster (Pantheon [1] for those curious). It's a fast, launched coaster and I guess the way I was sitting with the restraints hit the power button of my pixel 5 times and toggled the emergency call feature. I felt my smart watch vibrating with the ongoing call as we went up the top hat spike of the ride. Thankfully I was able to stop the call from my wrist before it connected. But that was the last time I didn't turn my phone off or put it in a locker before I got on a ride.
This puts them in the difficult position of changing up how emergency calls are made -- so anyone who might see this as a necessary feature will have to relearn their emergency button.
I'm somewhat curious what the data is on how many people use the "emergency call from locked screen" feature. Devices that detect crashes and such are a god send for safety. Being able to use the phone from locked state feels not nearly as useful.
Granted, this all became way worse with touch. I wouldn't be surprised if larger phones make it worse, too. I have loved my flip's ability to "close" and render this a non-issue. Wallet style cases also helped, back when I had a non foldable phone.
> I'm somewhat curious what the data is on how many people use the "emergency call from locked screen" feature.
Way back when cell phones were rare, the intention was that in an emergency you could make a call on someone else's phone, even if they were incapacitated. For example, a vehicle accident that left the phone owner unconscious while other passengers were OK.
In the modern age, where the US has 1.16 cell connections per person [1] the chances of needing to use someone else's phone are of course much reduced.
Looking through the settings, I reckon one can set a message to be sent automatically to your "emergency contacts", along with your location when you use the mentioned feature. A possible use case: coming home late at night, you get followed by a sinister looking guy; you can discreetly ask for help without pulling your phone.
> Until a patch comes out, Google's current recommendation is to turn the feature off. That's easier said than done. Many Android manufacturers like to scramble the settings, making online tutorials difficult, so your best bet might be to just search the system settings for "Emergency SOS."
Long time ago since I used android but how do y’all put up with this crap? It sounds incredibly frustrating. Aren’t phone vendors infamous for absolute abysmal UX?
I had this happen because I was (still am) using the vent with an adapter to put the phone. One time it slipped and I was trying to adjust it when all of a sudden it called 911. First thing I did when I parked was to disable it as 911 called me twice when I was driving and I couldn't reply the first time.
How's the shortcut useful when nobody has an idea it even exists except those who stumble upon it by mistake?!
My wife just did this a few days ago, she was bed ridden with the flu and I was out getting her some medicine.
The police came for a wellness check, and my wife had to talk to them through doorbell camera and explain that she can't come to the door because she was sick and extremely dizzy.
Yeah, that went over about as well as you'd think.
My worst pet peeve is seeing someone put a phone in their pocket with the screen still on. So the first thing I do on any phone is make sure that when I turn it off, it remains off, until a call or until I turn it back on.
This is common sense to me, but unfortunately most people use default settings.
I reflexively click the button to lock the phone before I put it in my pocket, but iOS has some impossible-to-disable shortcuts that work even when the screen is locked, such as activating the camera. Several times I've pulled my phone out to see that the camera is on. I've got no idea why this is possible with the phone "locked" but I've searched for a way to disable it and there doesn't seem to be one.
Android has double tap power to turn on camera (at least pixel does) and it's super handy for us. My wife might be holding my phone and want to take a picture of the kid and me, and this works without needing to type in the passcode or borrow my finger.
The Android settings search needs a lot of improvement. Nothing relevant matches 'power button'. 'emergency button' won't find anything either. You have to know to look in 'Emergency SOS' to know it exists without accidentally triggering it.
I recently got to speak with my friendly (ok no actually kinda annoyed with me) 911 operator because my power button got weirdly wedged which triggered the 5 tap panic mode and started up a 911 call faster than I could get my phone out of my pocket and swipe to cancel.
When I was a kid in the late 90s, my mom went back to college. She'd put her cell phone in her backpack, and the natural jostling would hit the emergency call button. Eventually the dispatchers called her back and figured out what was happening.
I had this happen to me a while ago. My old Pixel 3 was struggling with battery and boot looping issues so I picked up a Pixel 6. I had managed to boot up my phone and start transferring files and such over to my new phone when it suddenly started calling 911 over and over again.
Every time I turned it off, it would boot up again and then immediately call 911. I had to talk with the dispatchers multiple times very nicely that no, everything's fine, my phone is going nuts. Eventually I was able to bypass the screen and turn it off in settings before it rang again.
It gave me a massive scare and I thought my phone was crying bloody murder because I was switching to a newer one.
"The funny thing is, Android 12—and this easy emergency call feature—came out a year and a half ago. Thanks to the unique (uniquely bad) way that Android is rolled out, the feature is only now hitting enough people to become a national problem. Google's Pixel devices get new Android updates immediately, but everyone else can take months or years to get new versions of Android because it's up to your device manufacturer to make new, bespoke Android builds for every device they have ever released."
In Xiaomi smartphones it's even worse. You have the option to disable the feature (settings -> password & security -> emergency sos) and once you disable it...then it turns on the feature.
In case anyone else finds this helpful: I found my phone was still making the occasional pocket dial emergency call even after disabling the five power button press shortcut. A combination of features and scenarios led to the calls: using fingerprint login - which if you swipe and decide to use a manual login entry reveals an emergency call button. Double tap screen to wake, is the feature that turns the screen on in your pocket. Disabling this has ended all accidental emergency calls thus far for me.
Yeah, that's exactly what I expected would happen when I first accidentally exposed that button on the lock screen. And then it has become more and more easy to trigger with successive versions.
I acknowledge the intention... but I'm not sure it's a net good. And it requires others to bear the costs.
What stands out for me here is the bad update quality of android devices.
This feature hits, 18 month after it was introduced, the market in the UK . This is quite shocking to me. I expected a delay on average Android devices, but i thought it would be far less.
This happened in my pocket the other day, first time it happened. Samsung Galaxy S21+ that I have as a work phone. Suddenly a loud noise started blaring in the car and I had no idea where it came from until I noticed it had already started dialing 112.
My aging pixel had the four pushes of the power button to call 999. But the power button is faulty now so I had to turn off the emergency call and the press twice to activate the camera.
so, 2 related questions for people with product experience on something with this sort of scale and potential downsides.
- would this not be one of the best examples of when to use small, incremental canary releases with the emergency feature enabled?
- if you did do a canary release, i would think that one of your first contacts be EMS in the area that you were planning on rolling out the feature to, so that you’d get good feedback directly rather than through news reports. do apple and google just not do this?
Every electronic device needs to have a physical disconnect for the power supply. It should be considered a severe enough fault to warrant not getting market approval if this is missing.