When I had a Pixel4, I witnessed a car accident in which someone got hurt quite substantially.
Hard as a tried, the process of dialing 911 failed multiple times; the phone app simply crashed and left me with a blank screen or the home screen. I put a complaint in with my carrier but nothing was ever done. And of course Google could give 0 fucks with their customer support.
A few months later, I needed to call 911 for an emergency and it did work, but yeah... we got "Eventual Consistency" for an emergency.
Someone could put all of these reports together along with the paper trail of unresolved complaints to Google through discovery and likely end up with a great class action case or even a criminal negligence case.
911 is one of those things that absolutely must work and most phones will allow you through using any available network if you are out of range of your primary carrier.
The fact that this is unreliable on any mobile phone is completely unacceptable.
911 obviously doesn't have to work given the blatant disregard Google has had for 911 performance over multiple phone generations. I consistently had 911 calls fail on my Pixel 6, which led me to get rid of that device.
Some Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) also give zero shits about call answer time, NG911, 911 via text, or even consistently working E911.
E911 provides a static address to the public safety answering point when a 911 call comes in. NG911 enriches this with more accurate latitude longitude and height above ground level data, or for phones that are in a fixed location a room number or extension number can be provided to make it much easier for a routing emergency services.
We need a national system for 911, not this mishmash of 10 to 30-year-old proprietary systems serving the 5700 PSAPs put together for each department on a township, city or county basis, with minimal coordination across regions and states.
> 911 obviously doesn't have to work given the blatant disregard Google has had
Revoking all of their FCC approvals will fix this problem, and right quick.
Use of the PCS cellular spectrum is conditioned on several things; spectrum purchase by a carrier is necessary but not sufficient. Correctly-functioning emergency calling is one of the other conditions.
Well, how many times in your life do you call 911? I am in my forties and I maybe used my local equivalent 3 times and in every occurence someone else could have made the call.
And I've only used my mobile phone since my late 20's, it is not like I buy smartphones for emergency purposes.
> it is not like I buy smartphones for emergency purposes
How strange. That's the main reason I expect most people (especially on HN) would own a mobile phone at all. The ability to be contactable/make contact in an emergency is the greatest value it holds, surely?
Well I got my first mobile phone for emergency purposes, but not to call emergency services. I did it to receive nagios alerts at the time.
Now I only have a smartphone because it is more convenient than a landline one, that it serves multiple purposes (navigation system, music player, compact camera, voice recorder, web browser, wallet...) and because banks in europe are making it a requirement if you don't want to go in line to their office or an ATM for basic things.
It is not like it would serve much for emergency purposes because I rarely have any cell coverage when I would need it the most[1]
My colleague once told me that the reason telecom providers took so long with Android software updates was because they had to verify that the phone meets regulatory requirements after the update. One of these requirements was being able to dial 112 (Europe's 911) very thoroughly. There was a legally prescribed process (by BNetzA, IIRC) for doing that in Germany. After a quick Google search, it seems like there is something like that mandated by the FCC in the US.
I wonder how the Pixel 4 passed it. Not just in the US, but in many countries.
The Pixel 4 probably reliably called 911 on the simplest network config, like GSM or CDMA, but when encountering WCDMA, VoLTE and all the fun ways you can configure these technologies, you ended up with situations where the phone would perhaps have data service, but no ability to dial 911.
T-Mobile has had manufacturers brick band 12 on phones like the Moto E because you would get rural data coverage with this band, but T-Mobile did not sell any Moto phones and did not want to write a software config for VoLTE for Motorola phones. Without band 12 enabled the phone will happily roam onto AT&T or Verizon in areas where T-Mobile doesn't offer GSM service instead of hanging out on a cellular network that can never provide calling or texting at that location.
Dialing 911 in the EU can redirect you to 112, though I don't know how that redirection works. It's worth knowing the local emergency numbers in any case
You're down-voted because you kinda stopped short, but I think it's worth discussing: Many engineering disciplines deal with safety-critical stuff and often have robust process around validation of design and implementation as a result. There's heaps of non-safety-critical software written, and if the same processes, attitudes, and even personell, are applied to a safety-critical component of a generally non-safety-critical system (like mobile 911) then we get bugs like this that canget people killed. How does our field improve on this?
It will get mature like any other industry, however I cannot see how that happens before another century or two. The field's unfulfilled potential is just too big.
This article is about an incident from just last month, but the fact that there are 20+ failure reports over just Feb 2022-Jan 2023 (https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/y039zn/i_compi...), across multiple Pixel models, is insane. There’s something seriously wrong here.
Is there any data on how often this occurs with other brands, or what the failure rate was (i.e. how many attempts to call 911 succeeded in that time?) Otherwise 20+ reports certainly sounds bad but I don't really have a perspective on how bad it is. It could very well be that 20 failures across a year is within the expected failure rate due to unavoidable transient network issues.
And, it’s worth pointing out that the sales volumes of iPhones and just Samsungs (not counting any other brand) are many times that of Pixel, so if there was an issue even nearly as frequent with those phones it would definitely have been noticed by now.
Samsung has probably automated this testing given the number of SKUs they support, and they definitely have a lot more developers who are familiar with the cellular modems they use (Exynos and Snapdragon) to fix up edge cases unlike Google.
The Pixel 6 (Pro and non-Pro) is a great example of an improperly tuned LTE/5G NR modem. Cellular connectivity was unreliable as could be, and the random No Network issue seemed consistent across T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T, meanwhile a Pixel 7 or any other phone is stable and able to call/use data when this is occuring.
If this were a Samsung phone, it is likely their internal engineering could have identified the Exynos modem issue and pushed a patch, but no one at Google was familiar with the modem they bought from Samsung and they certainly have little leverage over 'em to get issues like this resolved.
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.
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.
In my country, engineers are legally responsible for their work to the point where insurance is required to do engineering. And yes, engineers that are negligent are held responsible. Just because you're ignorant doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
You know any software engineers with liability insurance? Also, you would have learned of many examples had you gone to engineering school, we have whole courses dedicated to laws and ethics.
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:
- 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.
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.
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.
Building a Faraday cage is an afternoon woodworking project. You can build them in your garage or bedroom with hand tools if you wanted. You don’t even need a huge room, a portable phone booth sized space could be mass produced and delivered on site. A Faraday Booth might take a few dozen square meters of copper mesh and some basic lumber, drywall and finishing efforts. If it took more than $10k per office I’d be shocked. This is something simple and cheap enough it could be something a local director or manager could charge to their company card and assembled themselves if they really cared.
It shouldn't be too expensive, but before you put in equipment and pretend to be the phone network, you need to make sure that you're hitting regulatory limits on the amount of RF leaking out. Doing a good enough job to hit that above a gigahertz--- including things like conducted RF, and validating with measurements-- is gonna cost a bit more than you describe.
[1]. $1k, -95dB to 3GHz, in stock, manufacturer standard I/O plates sold separately. I think there's zero room for hypotheticals and challenges to talk about setting these up if you ask not webdevs but actual phone people.
Who's the person who crawls into the tiny box and makes sure the dialer UI is doing the right thing, given that is what our primary concern is?
We've been talking about the cost of making a screened room. "Turnkey" ones cost about $20-50k, but you're going to pay contractors a fair bit beyond that. Not to mention whatever equipment you're putting inside.
You can get things like [1] - an RF blocking box with a window and attached RF-blocking gloves. This equipment is not at all exotic.
And if you don't like that option - you can also place test calls to 911 [2] by calling their non-emergency number and arranging a time. It would be easy to perform a once-a-month test call.
What it seems like they really need is some general black-box testing time to try and better identify what is going on, along with looking at logs from devices of users who had the problem.
A screened room with a few devices and a simulator seems like a good resource to have, and it's a reasonable thing to procure at a center or two if they don't have it. It just costs several tens of thousands, not $10k.
It seems like at this point 911 usually works on Pixel, and there's probably even good unit test and automated integration test of a lot of the components-- prearranged test calls with a given carrier's 911 impl isn't likely to fix it. But "usually" isn't good enough: Google needs to actually figure out what's going on, no matter what.
$50k is chump change for Google. Regardless, there are costs and regulations associated with making a phone, and if you aren’t willing to adhere to that, you’d better keep making search engines and other websites.
Yes, so being able to use the phone UI is important for qualitative testing.
> I don't understand why you're trying to shift the blame away from Google. That's just stupid.
I feel like you didn't read my comment. I stated that a screened room isn't prohibitively expensive, but can't be delivered for the suggested $10k. In another comment, I said "Society spends a few billion dollars a year on E911 and related infrastructure. To have faith in it eroded because of a little bit of slipshod validation by phone vendors is a false economy."
Why isn't it possible to have nuanced discussions-- to condemn Google's failure here, but also to suggest that the capital expense to give people realistic test environments is probably higher than others are suggesting?
You must have the UI? Call your factory, ask them make an extra ICE and hook it up to the simulator through an attenuator and shielded cables. Easy. Cost couple cars worth, so what. Add noises, simulate phasing, handover, do anything you want to. premises is, you're a top mass market smart phone manufacturer, and Google, both of that at the same time.
No, you're trying to find a way to make it sound impossible. But what you're saying is more along, probably, "finding a parking lot to test brakes is impossible even for a car company". Something real stupid as that.
No. I'm just saying that it costs like $40-100k in practice to get a screened room into operation, not $10k, but that this is still a reasonable expense.
But you're too boiling over in vitriol to understand nuance. Somehow, in your mind, saying that you can't do it for $10k appears to be me defending Google.
I think maybe GP is getting you confused with the person who brought up the suggestion it's expensive in the first place, before we started looking into what the numbers really would be. While the initial statement of that sounds like defending Google, that wasn't you, and unpacking the costs is intellectually interesting on its own merits, say, for anyone who might want to do it themselves.
Fine, for permitting and regulations and inspections, let’s 100x the cost and say it’s an annual expense too. This is still well within Google’s budgets to provide to their Android teams.
This discussion is moot btw. Google already has faraday cage and bts equipment, at least in the London office (6ps) where a large part of the Android team is located. And obviously so - the costs involved are a rounding error for Google. The problem must be somewhere else.
If Google, of all companies, can't afford the necessary testing equipment for a critical function, who can? If they thought that emergency services would make them money, they could have a lab in every office. But it won't, and so they don't care.
They are building their "Labs" which aims to offer high quality testing. They also have purchased a professional power supply tester as well.
They noticed cell phone reviews over time have dropped signal or quality testing. Which makes sense since each reviewer is just testing in their local environment with no standards or baseline so they were pretty meaningless anyways.
Are they going to be able to test enough phones and wifi/radio equipment to make it worth while? Not too sure.
Arguing an expensive price tag for Google just doesn't resonate. They are building a phone - it should be able to do the one thing that it should, as others have said. Anything outside of contacting someone in an emergency should be secondary.
So how do you explain Unity and Reddit and Twitter and Wizards of the Coast all belly flopping their PR this year? I'm sure they care, in some abstract sense, about PR (well, not Musk). I just think they're out of touch and incompetent at dealing with it. Some of them are even on the record saying it will blow over and the benefits of not caring are worth the cost, like the Reddit CEO. Clearly the costs of bad PR aren't high enough.
They care if bad PR results in less money. Wizards +Unity realized they pushed too hard and will ultimately cost them. Reddit thinks their decision still makes financial sense.
And Google is making exactly the same calculation. Maybe they'll do something to fix it after a hundred people die because they can't call 911 and it blows up nationally.
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?
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
I don't see why it would be expensive, for no other than Google, to set up a microwave oven with a factory rooted phone and a femtocell inside on ~dozen locations worldwide. There's no special legal or financial complexities in doing that.
And selling phones that can't pass certification is just irresponsible. If you can't make a product work, you're free to be responsible and cancel a product. It's on Google to do businesses legally.
The faraday cage in a microwave is good for its purpose, but not good enough at blocking cell phone bands. They would need something slightly more expensive, anywhere from $1000 to $50k depending on how fancy they wanted to be. Of course Google should have no problem affording any of that, but these details do matter.
I suspect that the problem must be more complex than a bug in just the phone or the OS; for one thing, the problem is intermittent and doesn’t affect every phone. Still, the lack of action from the FCC is disturbing.
Can't you stand up your own test network for that? Other phones won't connect to that, so you don't need to fully rf isolate, as long as you have some trust in the test network not doing crazy things. It's well over a decade ago, in Europe, and I was only very peripherally involved, but it didn't seem that hard to get permits for such a test network indoors.
I think the problem is, 911/112 calls are routed through the best cell network available. This means that if somebody is close enough to your lab, their phone would still try to use your femtocell.
From very dim memory: I think there's some flag you can set that marks your test network as not suitable for that kind of thing. But even if not, IIRC you can set routing information for stuff like 911 on a subscriber basis in your test network - which you'd just do for the handset you're testing.
In that case, you'd just be changing yet another variable and not test the emergency mode of the modem - which might actually be broken due to a software update, right?
> 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.
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.
I had the same issue with my Pixel 5. I booked an uber one time and suddenly it dialed 911. Have to switch off the phone. Most tensed 30 mins of last winter. Later figured out the issue with power button; works fine till now.
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.
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.
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.
I will say I have had plenty of similar issues across my iPhone devices. For a variety of reasons these phones fail to make calls. Drop calls or can’t dial 911. I suspect voice calling itself has become network deprioritized or still has trouble selecting between calling tech.
I worked on dialer for pixel and and am deeply familiar with these problems. Voice call tech is easily one of those mostly worthlessly convoluted spaces in mobile. That being said while I was there we put a huge priority on emergency calling — however the exec overseeing the space often complained about how hard dialer was and bemoaned all the required work because it never helped her promotions.
When did you have problems dialing 911 with an iPhone? It seems like something worth reporting - feedback to Apple, public posting, etc.
Dropped calls etc. do happen for a variety of reasons, but there have been next to no reports of iPhones being unable to dial 911 (assuming a decent cell signal, etc.), and that would be a much more serious issue.
I’m going to be the one to say that you definitely didn’t have the same issue with an iPhone. As much as people love shitting on Google they love shitting on Apple 100x more and it would be front page news for days if what you are saying is true.
I like using a heavily scrutinized phone. When Apple throttled my iPhone 6, there was so much media backlash that they responded by adding an option to disable the throttling. Android issues like this would likely get swept under the rug, especially with a non-Pixel device where someone else makes the hardware and both sides avoid blame.
> I suspect voice calling itself has become network deprioritized or still has trouble selecting between calling tech.
Whilst this may be true for normal voice, almost universally emergency calling is the highest network priority[0], knocking other voice and data sessions off another carriers tower if required.
All cell phones with 911 functionality should have a way to periodically test that the 911 feature is fully functional. The reality is that I rarely even make a phone call anymore... but I don't even know whether being able to make a call implies 911 works? And I don't know if its still true but there used to be pretty significant fines for calling 911 so I'm not just going to dial 911 and say "making sure this still works!" The phone should just be doing various deadman switch type tests on the network/911 health-checks and report to me whether it is working or not working. It has a freaking GPS and can identify cell towers, so it should be pretty trivial to maintain test data and schedule. Relying on life-critical devices that can't be tested seems really sketchy.
This is true for many young people. Turns out phone calls are pretty much the only time the earpiece speaker gets used on a phone. Lots of people have killed their earpiece speaker by filling it with sand, salt, water, lint, etc. Speakers seem to die more easily when never used, presumably because use vibrates dirt out. End result: When they call 911 they can't hear anything.
My phone currently has a dead earpiece speaker, and I just know that if I need to call 911, it better be on speakerphone.
I only ever listen to audio on my phone through my headphones (no exaggregation, 100% of time during last 5 years). I guess in case of an emergency I won't have time to connect them before the call. I also don't use facetime. So for me the GP remark is certainly true.
From that link:
Test calls confirm that your local 911 service can receive your 911 call and has the correct location information. Test calls can be scheduled by contacting your local 911 call center via its non-emergency phone number.
I used to have a Pixel 2 XL and then later a Pixel 5a. Went through them really fast as the hardware was pretty bad and the phone would just decide to stop turning on at some point. Same thing happened to a relative I gave a Pixel 5a. Phone didn't last a year.
Don't get me started on the Pixel buds. I got tired of contacting customer support for replacements.
That's when I decided not to buy hardware from Google again, and also stopped using Android. Experience in iPhone has been great so far. Phone's fast despite being several generations behind, don't have to worry about not getting security updates.
Nexus 4, Pixel 2 XL, Pixel 4 XL, Pixel 6 Pro – never had any issues whatsoever, all phones still alive and kicking at my grandparents' places. Yes, most of them tied to the wall now... but hey, they're fine for showing some photos and displaying current time or setting alarms.
Interestingly, I also used Samsung's Note 9 and 10+, iPhone 12, iPhone 14 Pro Max – daily, also with no issues... other than disliking Samsung's software.
(I was/am doing a lot of mobile work so I test a lot of phones)
After years of doing this kind of testing, it's hard for me to believe that the entire batches of phones are so fundamentally broken... I'd rather bet on software issues, but who knows.
I had two pixels suffer heat deaths on me (after random boot cycles) switching around iphone 8 time and haven't had a problem out of the 3 devices I've owned from them. Got tired of Android being weird plus relaying everything I did on the phone to google to share with 3rd parties.
I own Pixel 4a for a few years now (I bought it when it was quite new, now it's EOL). I never had any software or hardware problems, and it's my favourite phone I ever had.
(we can keep the anectodal evidence going, but not sure what's the value in that. People clearly have different experiences, and the selection of people reading comments about a Pixel issue is likely far from random).
Got gifted a pair of pixel buds gen 2. I liked them. Accidentally sent them through a wash cycle killing the left one. Eventually straight up lost the left one. Thought nothing of it until I changed phones and realized a hardware limitation meant you needed both to pair to a new device. Dumb but I needed a new one anyways so…
I contacted support after not seeing spares were being sold. They gave me an 25$ store credit… Ended up selling the case and working earbud and getting a different brand.
Recently changed phones and them pulling the headphone jack from the A series after the 5 was a non-starter for me. I still use wired headphones and plug my aux into my car and other places :/ kinda mind boggling
They are so lucky. My Samsung Phone already called 911 several times, while I had it in my pocket. And every time I have to explain why. I guess I'll get a Pixel next time.
Samsung makes some of the stupidest devices I've ever owned. Back when I had Samsung phones, they did all sorts of things while in my pocket. I experienced multiple butt-dials, music randomly playing, etc. Fortunately, mine never dialed 911. But I could have lived without those moments where death metal started blasting from my pocket because I leaned the wrong way. And let's not get me started on their TVs. Maybe it's not so bad now that their phones support fingerprint scanning, but I wouldn't put it past them to screw that up, too. I sincerely believe that most people who continue to own Samsung devices simply don't know better. Such flimsy bloated crap for products that are supposed to "compete" with Apple, Microsoft, and The Google.
Had this issue awhile ago, out of nowhere it just started dialing 911 while in my pocket. Turns out some setting was re-enabled after a recent update. Went to Settings > Advanced features > Motions and gestures > Double tap to turn on screen > Disable and I think that finally fixed it. This is on a Samsung A71 5G.
Yes, I ran into the same problem and this "fixed" it. The issue doesn't come from the feature itself but from the fact that the lower end model uses "Virtual proximity sensing" instead of a real proximity sensor which is often faulty. It sucks that Samsung chooses to cut costs in these places.
If it's possible the power button is getting bumped repeatedly in your pocket. You could search your Android settings, and make sure "Emergency SOS" is turned off.
It’s also possible that there’s a hardware failure that is making the power button erroneously report button presses, leading to the Emergency SOS. This happened to me on a Pixel 3, which resulted in repeated calls to 911 with no user input.
* Can’t power it off for the night, because the flaky power button turns it back on.
* Can’t pull the SIM card, because emergency calls don’t require a SIM card to connect.
* Can’t consistently use the “slide to cancel” option, as the phone was also trying to initialize the camera at the same time. (IIRC,
3 button presses for the camera, 5 button presses for SOS. The flaky power button managed to trigger SOS while the camera was still initializing the GUI, so the camera GUI took focus.)
* Can’t access the settings, because the flaky power button either turns the phone off, opens the camera, or sends an SOS faster than I could search the settings.
This all started at about 10 PM. So, instead of going to sleep, I needed to spend the next two hours baby-sitting my phone as it mostly was repeatedly rebooting, with occasional calls to 911, until the battery finally died.
As in my other comment, this likely comes from the fact that lower end phones use "virtual proximity sensing" instead of a real proximity sensor, and they have a lot of issues when the phone is in a pocket. You need to either disable the double tab feature or upgrade to a "real" flagship like S23.
Do explain why! Is there a shortcut on the lock screen that you can't turn off or how?
Two or my four smartphones have been Samsungs and, while I could call 112 on purpose, I don't know what might cause pocket dialing. Your comment about this being a feature rather than a bug on Pixels is funny though =)
Yes, it's possible to dial 911 from a locked phone. I assume that's a legal requirement; on its face it's pretty reasonable.
I never used to lock my phone at all, but starting with the Pixel 3a I've been forced to do it by the fact that the phone interprets rubbing against my leg through my pocket as a stream of commands. I wish manufacturers would go back to the non-crazy screens they used to make. Anyway, since locking the phone doesn't disable the ability to call 911, this is a constant risk, though I don't believe I've made an accidental call yet. (Or maybe I would have, if my phones weren't Pixels!)
I have mangled a text note I was keeping on my phone beyond recovery when I once put my phone in my pocket without manually locking it first.
No, I can't turn it off and it was always from a locked screen, I think it's a legal requirement in the EU. I now keep my phone always with the screen turned away from my leg in my pocket and that seems to prevent it well enough, even though I still often get to almost calling 911 when I take it out of my pocket with my hand.
> I can't turn it off and it was always from a locked screen, I think it's a legal requirement
But my question was: what is the it that your phone has? I don't have such a button on my lock screen.
There's a camera and a flashlight shortcut (too few shortcuts for my liking but better than bare android with zero shortcuts)
Ah, right yes that makes sense. I don't want to bother with entering a password on a device I use dozens of times a day so never set one, that explains why I don't see such a button: people can just get to the dialer if they need to call a number while I'm incapacitated
Well I have to now, because the screen also stopped working 90% of the time, except when I put it in the freezer for 15 minutes. Just 2 months that the phone is conveniently out of warranty. I guess it's the last Samsung Phone I'll ever buy.
There should be some kind of test number twin of 911 that works exactly the same (without SIM, supplying E911 data), but just plays a pre-recorded message optionally with some "debug" info.
That is such an obviously good idea I'm surprised it doesn't exist. Apparently the official way to test it in the UK is to email them and schedule a test. They say they use the real 999 because that's the best way to guarantee that it works, and that's true - but there's definitely utility in having an almost-real number that you can test at any time guilt free.
They probably just can't be bothered to set it up tbh.
The article says to test by calling the non-emergency number, but that seems like a really unrealistic test. Even if they offered a test version of 911, I wouldn't trust that it works exactly the same as 911.
If you follow the link you'll see the procedure is you call the non-emergency number to ask for a time and location slot where you're allowed to call the real 911 number for test purposes. This let's them schedule you for a time where they predict lower demand. Seems sensible to me.
I remember from my days building SIP clients that a lot of carriers support 933, which is exactly what you're asking about. You can try googling a bit to see if your carrier supports it.
If Google employees actually used the phones they build we wouldn't have a lot of the issues we have them. I'm still annoyed that the little weather icon on the home screen has about a 2x2 pixel hitbox.
When it appears at all. What kind of UI designer thinks it's OK not to show the weather most of the time when the user explicitly configured the settings to show it?
It is possible to intercept a lot of Android system broadcasts. In the B2B world, we often had weird requests to take over the whole phone experience and do something different – made possible by the same core Android APIs that they ship both to business devices and personal devices.
I'm also not surprised to read that Teams was to blame, because Skype had the same functionality back in the days.
This was the final straw for me and why I switched from a Pixel to an iPhone. I refuse to die because my $800 smart device couldn't get me help that would have otherwise been available. Apple may be a scummy company just like all the other ones but the one thing they do seem to take very seriously is safety. I'm sure other people feel the same way but it doesn't seem like this message is getting to Google.
I did the exact same thing last year when I first heard of this (recurring) issue. Safety is not part of a promo packet, so who at Google cares to fix it?
I hate how Apple infantilizes the user, but at least they have vision of making a product. Not a collection of promotion producing ideas.
Safety is definitely one of Apple’s key marketing points—you might have seen their ads for fall detection/emergency SOS on the Apple Watch or car crash detection on the iPhone.
To be fair, Samsung produces much more reliable phones than Google, especially their S series phones, if you wanted to stay in the Android system. They are also quite good with system updates and security updates -- not the best but top tier by Android standards.
I tried to use my old pixel 3 recently as a hotspot. Blows my mind how it’s been broken for a while (according to online) and won’t ever be fixed since there’s no more software support. I ended up buying a used iPhone SE instead.
The experience has been good for me, but I'm in no way an average smartphone user. The apps I use are mainly Whatsapp, Firefox and Spotify Lite.
I think grapheneOS the best choice if you don't tolerate a proprietary OS on your smartphone.
Disclaimer: Pixel 3a support on GrapheneOS is EOL, but you can still download it and install it.
Some observations:
- I have not had any calls dropped.
- I don't remember a case where I couldn't get mobile data while being in an urban area. At least LTE and 3G work well.
- UI is snappy.
- You can install Google Play Services in a sandbox, but some apps, notoriously most banking apps, crash on launch, probably because they implement Play Integrity API.
- If you install Google Play Services in the sandbox, Whatsapp messages arrive instantly. If you don't, they do sometimes, sometimes they take some time, and sometimes you need to launch the app to see the messages.
- The default apps lack a cohesive UI appearance. The photo gallery looks as if it was taken from a 7 year old Android version. The clock app and settings app look up to date. The SMS app looks different from all the other apps mentioned.
- The default app icons are in black and white, which doesn't look bad in itself, but your app list screen looks ugly when you start installing other apps whose icons are not black and white.
- I don't remember a case of system apps crashing or the whole OS getting frozen in the 10 months that I've used it. And I don't remember feeling frustration because of system unresponsiveness.
Had exactly the same thing in Australia when trying a 000 (Australia's emergency number) call with my Pixel 6 Pro after watching somebody run off the road and smash into a pole.
Fortunately I had the local police station number and was able to call that just fine, but not until a few failed attempts at the real emergency number.
That said, another good option is attempting to call 112. Which is an emergency number in many countries. (Works in the US too).
Disheartening to see this. I was planning on getting a pixel for my next phone and hoping this might be a 911 only issue but obviously it's related to emergency dialing all-round.
> 112. Which is an emergency number in many countries.
There's a lot of the planet where 112 will work, often as a redirect to the actual number.
I had a Bluetooth keyboard in a backpack turned On in the trunk of my car while driving .... random key presses while driving from bumps in the road managed to dial 911 ... or make the phone think it was an emergency and 911 was called. Not fun.
The keyboard was spamming gibberish, eg NN nZzz1457_+-5hhhsvb .... etc
It took me a while to figure out why the phone appeared possessed...
In my experience (which is about as relevant to this topic as one can imagine), regulatory-required features in software always get built in really shitty ways.
These are some of the reasons I've seen for why:
-the regulation isn't sufficiently flexible to allow the company to build it in a way that makes the most sense for their system
-for the same reason testing, user research and feedback largely don't matter
-the projects are led by legal or compliance teams who are generally terrible at building features
-the feature isn't requested by customers so the company has very limited dialogue with the user about it
-the feature will not make money so no one at the company is incentivized to build it well or spend time on it
I would like to see this lead to corporate manslaughter charges. I swear I've seen reports of this for years for multiple Pixel phones and the fact it's still ongoing is incredibly negligent.
Interesting. This might not be a bug in Google's dialer (or the OS, or hardware). Based on my past experience building B2B SIP clients, I remember that there are ways to intercept many of the Android system broadcasts. I'd bet on that being the root cause. Intercepting would look like the app is crashing, when instead it would be attempting to re-route requests to a different app; someone else mentioned they detected Microsoft Teams doing that. I remember Skype also had this feature, so it sounds plausible.
In the B2B world, we often had weird requests e.g. to take over the whole phone experience and do something different – this was made possible by the same core Android SDKs that they ship both to business devices and personal devices.
For example, we were required to move each 911 call to our app first, then check if we can route it quicker through the internal PBXs, and if not – send it back to the native/built-in dialer. This was possible a couple of years ago, we built it. I assume it's still possible because it's really rare that you need this kind of functionality... releasing such an app also requires a special review from Google. Maybe Google sees it as a low risk to the user experience and allows some apps to still do it, at least until something like this issue happes.
Surely it is a legal requirement that mobile phones be able to call the emergency services? If it doesn't do that then surely a crime has been committed?
When my OnePlus 8T lags, I sometimes press the power button a few times, because I'm impatient and I'm trying to get the screen to turn on.
Pressing the power button 5 times dials the emergency service number by default, so I've almost called emergency services a few times already. I usually manage to cancel it before it dials, but wow.
FWIW, you can disable that in settings (both the power button thing, as well as the auto-dial if you prefer to get to that page via buttons). At least, if the 8T is similar to other phones.
Sometimes people ask me, why do I use an iPhone when Android phones are so much better in this or that respect.
And the thing is, none of iPhones I had my hands on (since 4S maybe) have never failed me as phones. When I need to place or receive a call, the call is placed or received. No shenanigans with sound, microphone, connections. If there is a connection problem, I can be 100% sure it's the carrier. With Android, all bets are off. When Maemo was a thing, all bets were off, it could enter a 100% CPU-hogging busy loop during a call and you would be SOL, or you wouldn't be able to hang up, or some such shit.
The only other cellular thing that I could 100% rely on was my Nokia 1280 and a 1112 before it, but 2G networks are being wound down in my area, alas.
> And the thing is, none of iPhones I had my hands on (since 4S maybe) have never failed me as phones. When I need to place or receive a call, the call is placed or received. No shenanigans with sound, microphone, connections. If there is a connection problem, I can be 100% sure it's the carrier.
Just saying, I've used only Android phones since 2009 or so, and I've never once had a problem with the phone functionality. It's not like this is some problem with Android in general.
It's really absurd how such a problem still exists. Couldn't a separate method be used for emergency calling? For example drop to 3g, don't use the dialer app but a separate "emergency" app.
If talking about the US (though it’s not the only place that uses the number 911, and I would imagine that other countries’ numbers would be affected): all the major 3G networks have been shut down, so your current options for major networks are T-Mobile’s 2G network (which I successfully dialed 911 with a couple of months ago while in the US, but it’s only spottily available, and it’s being shut down next year), or 4G networks.
More generally, though, using different code paths for emergency dialing is the root of the problem in the first place—you want to minimise special handling of things like this, because less-tested paths are much more likely to be buggy. Consider also: error handling code is pretty much the buggiest out there, because it’s seldom tested.
At least 2 decades ago when I worked with phones the phone as a list of emergency numbers which could be updated to country-spefic values. Often 000, 112, and 911 were always present.
Once the software notices one of these numbers dialled call handling will go a completely different code path than normal calls.
I have no idea how things work in Android, where you obviously must have VoIP hooks?
>I have no idea how things work in Android, where you obviously must have VoIP hooks?
Yes, there's emergency IMS (basically volte/vonr version of SIP) profiles the phone is supposed to register to and all the carriers towers advertise emergency numbers in their signaling.
The problem with 4G (and 5G) is that it supports only internet traffic. Phone traffic is passed trough VoLTE that is VOIP on the network. Is something that is fairly new, few years ago only a couple of operators in my country even supported that, and thus phones had to drop to 3G to handle calls. Also VOIP is not that reliable and presents problems especially with different networks.
The problem is when the internet connection is not so stable, and thus VoLTE doesn't work that well. The safer option would be to drop to 3G or even 2G if available to complete emergency calls.
I think you missed the point in the post that you are replying to saying carriers have dropped 3G and the only remaining 2G network is also on its way out. Where I live all carriers are planning to phase out 3G by the end of 2025. All but one carrier have already phased out 2G.
We need to forget about falling back to 3G or 2G as that is not a viable solution in the long run. The carriers and phone manufactures have a responsibility to make emergencies calls work well over VoLTE.
It would be great if when 911 is dialed the phone dropped into a “black box” state where all unnecessary functionality is suspended to maximize battery and signal. It could alert emergency contacts w/ location pings, start recording voice and video, and go into a heightened security mode to avoid tampering.
I thought 3G networks have been shut down in the US? (Not living there but I remotely maintain some devices with cellular modems over there, so the topic has somewhat of professional interest.)
Incorrect, T-Mobile's 2G network is active until this coming April. Both their 3G networks (theirs and the Sprint legacy one) are shut down as they used more spectrum. Keeping GSM going the spectrum use is minimal.
Having dedicated code path for 911 is literally the problem. It makes it legally almost impossible to test in many countries (since in many countries you're not allowed to dial 911 if you don't have an emergency)
Which countries? Where I live, in the US, if you want to make a callback to a police detective, you have to call 911 and ask to be transfered. It's clearly not an emergency, and the detective will tell you to do it. This police department doesn't have a phone system that allows the public to call a non-emergency number and have their calls routed.
But most places I've lived in the US had a non-emergency police number, and non-emergency 911 calls were very discouraged. If you have a good reason to make them for network or device testing, you'd just need to schedule a time to make a test call, stay on the line and tell the operator, etc.
Device development would be well served by using a tower simulator in a Faraday cage, as a sibling suggested. But a responsible developer would do a few tests on live networks during release acceptance testing.
Just call nearest Rohde & Schwarz office and get a signaling tester... If you're doing phone firmware, there should be couple extra briefcases of cash for that. No need to call actual 911 just to test a dev branch build.
Probably not exactly what you are looking for, but when one is in such a situation and they happen to have an app like Skype, people can use it for emergency calls (support in the US)
Realistically, if you care about software/hardware quality at all in your smartphone, there are only two options: Iphone or Galaxy S phones. Anything else and you have to be ready to face a bunch of problems.
It seems pretty odd that liability-lawsuit lawyers haven't managed to monetize this "feature" enough to push "removing" it further up the priority list. Anybody have some insight?
My Pixel journey from 1 to 6A ended a few months ago, I can't no longer trust Pixel phones. Even though they seem very fast and responsive at first, they're not reliable in many situations like calling 911, getting Wifi signal, receiving calls, ... All of Pixel phones I got since the 1st version have some kind of major issues. I trusted Google with the software and I thought I could continue, but I had to switch to iPhones.
If you would be isolated on a random place and given the chance to bring only one item, you would most probably pick the phone. On both ethical and user-experience cases, this is completely unacceptable. Google is just bringing the trust issues for such a silly bug.
They certainly have in the past. There are core issues with how Android deals with phone apps and prioritization. Quite a few threads on here about previous 911 issues.
Exactly. If the FCC (or someone) said "your certification of these devices is revoked and any further imports are banned" I GUARANTEE Google would instantly spin up a dedicated, capable, and prioritized 911 team.
Omnipresent use of 911 has been arguably the most impactful killer app since cell phones first emerged over 40 years ago. It has saved countless lives. In the days of not having a landline this is completely unacceptable.
To have issues utilizing 911 from a cellular device in 2023 is exactly the kind of thing regulators should make painful for device manufacturers who can’t even get this right.
What’s even more puzzling is the brand and reputational damage when stories emerge in the press of people dying because their $500 (or more) device couldn’t do something a free phone without a SIM card can do.
You’d think they’d take this seriously if for no other reason other than self interest.
Because it's so obvious. I didnt't think about dialing 112 when buying my phone, but if I knew my phone can't call it I'd carry a small, second "emergency" phone that can at all times. Or buy another phone.
> We mandated legacy telecos to maintain switching offices with a weeks worth of battery power so landlines could work in a natural disaster.
Not disagreeing with the topic at hand but this isn't even consistent anymore. When they switched to FttN for DSL in my area I noticed the batteries for the nodes only last a day before they die and I lose landline service.
I own one, and reading this I most definitely want a refund. It is utter bolox. Sure, every once in a while your car brakes fail, but that's not really the point of the car, is it? It's made to go forward! Anyways, we will get if fixed eventually. Do you like our newest, just released paint colors?
Being able to call 911 is an essential part of a phone. To the point that Apple (and I'm assuming Google) both allow calling emergency services while the phone is locked.
Yes, because 3GPP defines requisite emergency call flow, and FCC require phones able to make emergency calls without SIM. It's not a gesture of generosity.
Disproportionate? Google must be worth what, a trillion dollars by now? And they can't get emergency service dialing working worldwide? There's clearly not enough legal liability to get them to do what society expects them to be doing. People are going to fucking die because of their negligence. Literally every minute is precious when someone is having a heart attack, we don't have time to fuck around with Google bullshit. Society should start calculating that damage and making Google pay all of it multiplied by 10.
Some people love so much they dismiss critical issues? Apple got fined for extending the life of old phones without notifying the users, where do you think this issue sits in relation?
That tends to happen when the party to be penalized shows how much it doesn't give a shit until it starts to hemorrhage money, because fines are just a cost of doing business. So let the blood flow.
My experience has been Pixel phones suck for calls in general. I know of 3 people with Pixel 3As that intermittently can’t receive calls. Often it takes 2-3 calls to these people in order to get 1 to go through. Setting the phones to prefer 4G has so far fixed the problem most reliably but the whole calling stack on pixel phones needs some work IMO.
This is one thing I miss about the old Windows Phones (Nokia/Metro interface sucked, but damn) because it was a phone first, computer second. Most phones these days are computers (or cameras) first, phones last.
For example, the WP would progressively disable things to keep the phone on for as long as possible. At 2am, after a night out, I'd usually be the only one who had a working phone to call a cab (pre-uber days) -- but that was the last feature to stop working before it died. IIRC, you could disable this functionality, but I don't know why you would want to.
I have a pixel 6 pro and this has been my experience since they day I got it. I even had it replaced and still have to reset the cellular modem several times per week because I get the no service `!`.
Starting to believe it is a T-Mobile service issue in my area. Previously had a pixel 2 on Verizon and never had a problem. Planning to leave T-Mobile in the near future.
Pixel 6 on AT&T, I don't think I've ever had this experience.
Phone calls sound much better than my previous carrier (some cheap mvno) and things generally Just Work.
Only complaint is that it's missing some things I hadn't realized were not stock Android, such as per-app volume control. I just might switch back to LG after this one dies, though the battery seems to be holding up much better so who knows.
Do you use wifi calling when you are at home? It has been my experience that T-Mobile WiFi calling is absolutely terrible, and I've oftentimes wondered if something in the software "locks" into WiFi instead of switching to cellular data, until the phone is rebooted.
Hard as a tried, the process of dialing 911 failed multiple times; the phone app simply crashed and left me with a blank screen or the home screen. I put a complaint in with my carrier but nothing was ever done. And of course Google could give 0 fucks with their customer support.
A few months later, I needed to call 911 for an emergency and it did work, but yeah... we got "Eventual Consistency" for an emergency.