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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
200 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadLuckily 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".
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.
Years of iphone and I’m still not quick at blindly figuring out which set of buttons I’m touching.
Pro tip: the volume button is much looonger than the power button. That's how I tell them apart, anyway.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
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.
What the hell is wrong with these people? We are humans, not a data science project.
Source: I've had human subjects training
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.)
This is common sense to me, but unfortunately most people use default settings.
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
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'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.
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.
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.
It amazes me that the simplest thing is not done here: if proximity sensor senses your screen is covered - do not enable the screen ever.
When I'm jogging my phone sometimes sends texts, runs apps etc, same when I have phone in my pocket.
Why don't they use proximity sensor?
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.
The sensor is prone to false positives, such as when you have the phone in a waterproof pouch while hiking or boating.
This works well, until the prox sensor stops working (e.g. a piece of dust lands on it) and you can no longer get the phone screen to turn on.
It cuts both ways. :(
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.
And I'm sure I didn't push the power button because it's quite hard to press in the case I'm using (Spigen tough armor)
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Now the iPhone's fake 911 call issue comes from its "auto car crash detection," which gets set off when people ski and, well, fall.
https://gizmodo.com/iphones-false-911-calls-bonnaroo-android...
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.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34157142
the first time I cancelled the call, they called back and I explained.
second time, I stayed on the line to explain, which they appreciated. this time I turned the feature off.
third time was on a new phone and hadn't disabled it...
I don't remember if iphone switch the volume button side between generations, but on Android it's not consistent model to model..
it's a great idea for sure, but it's easy to do accidentally if you confuse volume for power.
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...
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.
I wonder if too many "smart" false alarms will lead to similar regulation.
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.
Are your records shared or aggregated up to a central agency?
Wondeing how we might calculate the cost/benefit analysis.
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.
Seconds literally matter for many emergencies.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
My second favorite is when you search for things, it shows up in search, you tap and it brings you to a page and the setting isn't there.
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.
Great, isn't it?
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.
[1] https://rcdb.com/16812.htm
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.
(EDIT: grammar)
A swiss piece, ~20k retail.
It's a nice piece of men's jewelry, but that's all it is.
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.
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.
> 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?