What tripped me up the one time I really needed to call 911 on a Pixel was it auto-sends the call after the second 1. Any other call, you dial the number, 555-555-5555, then press the green phone button to send the call. Dialing 911, it instantly starts calling, and the send button changes to hangup.
I kept pressing 911 and rapidly pressing where the send key was and moving the phone to my ear to hear silence. Dial 911, press what I thought was send, put it to my ear, silence. The worst sound you want to hear when you're alone and need 911 immediately. Eventually I took a breath and went slow to see what was happening and finally noticed it was automatically sending the call.
Changing how a normal process works in a rare emergency in order to save a single second, but introducing a potentially dangerous amount of confusion, seems like a terrible design.
Dialing 911, it instantly starts calling, and the send button changes to hangup.
I find this kind of crap all over the place in Android - buttons dancing around or changing function so idiotically that it almost feels like my phone is intentionally trying to trip me up.
The designers also seem stuck under an assumption the user is operating in an act-look feedback loop. In reality, good tools let you shift your focus away from them once you become proficient - the mechanics of their use becomes second nature and fades into the background allowing you to focus on your task - exactly the way you found yourself relying on muscle memory in that razor-focused, high stakes situation.
I'm saying this not only as a lifelong tech nerd, but from lived experience as a First Responder (where we routinely deal with high-stress situations, and aim to train with our equipment until it's too familiar to get wrong). It's unconscionable they'd ship such an inconsistent behavior in a function that is at once critical and rarely-exercised.
The problem wasn't you, it was your shoddily designed tool.
> The designers also seem stuck under an assumption the user is operating in an act-look feedback loop
Remember that most of the technology industry today is primarily an ad delivery platform - either current one (aka there are ads there already), or a future one (so even areas where there aren’t ads yet aren’t safe).
Designers want you to always be in an act-look loop, because then you’ll either look at the ad which is already there, or at the very least generate more “engagement” which pumps up their analytics numbers (translates to promotions/salary) and ultimately translates to more ads (the company can now pitch this high-engagement screen real estate to the highest bidder).
The era where computers/technology did things as their primary function appears to be just a happy accident. It’s only a matter of time before you get ads for health insurance while you dial 911.
It's ok guys, I'm on it. I filed a support ticket with Google a couple years ago, and I'm sure they are just busy and will get back to me soon. I am a paid subscriber, after all.
This is why I forcefully moved my family to iPhone. Preferences be damned. I need to know that in an emergency, 911 will work for them. Google is unserious about phones. Always have been.
I have the opposite problem with pixels: they keep trying to call 911 on their own. On the past couple Pixel phones I've had, the power button started to click itself on its own and ignoring my presses. Turns out Google, in their infinite wisdom, made rapidly clicking the power button into a shortcut for calling 911.
As an aside, I really liked my Google Nexus 5x, but it felt like basic quality control fell off a cliff for the Pixel line.
Between Pixel 2/4/8 (yeah yeah what can I say I'm a masochist), I had problems with out-of-focus pictures, widely inaccurate GPS, and my absolute favorite making a call which would dial the number and then about a second later immediately hang up.
I had a brief fling with using an iPhone but the speech-to-text dictation was absolute GARBAGE DAY and I make pretty heavy use of that feature while walking my dog.
This doesn't surprise me. Google still refuses to fix basic bugs in the distribution of android used in pixel devices. The alarm bug (where alarms will not work for days/weeks at a time, randomly) has existed since the pixel 1 and still affects the current generation of pixel phones.
Google and Microsoft both treat their operating systems with this very palpable level of disdain.
The only updates for Windows are oriented around extracting more data or as revenue or integrated Microsoft product annoyances. Bugs are ignored for YEARS sometimes, major updates with huge issues get fired off with casual abandon.
Google is less openly hostile, but I get the very strong feeling that the android and pixel teams are about 6 people a piece. Like software in very deep maintenance mode. What bothers me most about this is less "android never receives big changes or major features" but instead "android/pixel has a big list of obvious bugs and has for a VERY long time, and they never get acknowledged ,much less fixed."
The camera app video judder saga is a prime example. (https://reddit.com/comments/1o1i5hi) How the HELL has nobody noticed and fixed this over there? Why is a random community member being forced to deal with this? Honestly pathetic work from Alphabet.
Just realized I can’t exactly test any of my phones ability to call emergency services without a true emergency… even if they made a test number it still wouldn’t truly be the real thing.
There are many silly bugs and inconveniences not getting fixed. In Pixel's Android you cannot swap the three navigation buttons, whereas in all other brands it's easy to do. I prefer to have the "back" button to the right, and yet Pixel doesn't allow me to set up it that way. It's on the left, the way the developer who wrote that likes.
Also, in the Google Message app used for sending text messages, when you have 2 SIMs from the same carrier in your phone, you can't tell through which one you got the SMS (if this is a message to which you can't reply, e.g., an advertisement). You get the carrier name instead of the SIM card name which you set up in the settings. This is not specific to Pixels.
RCS is a joke. Either "your device doesn't support" it, or "your carrier doesn't support" it, or there are other issues. Nobody cares about their RCS, the entire planet uses WhatsApp, or iMessage, because they just work, unlike RCS.
Silly issues. That's Google in all their glory. They can do magic that serves billions of people, but they are unable to polish the edges.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 39.5 ms ] threadI kept pressing 911 and rapidly pressing where the send key was and moving the phone to my ear to hear silence. Dial 911, press what I thought was send, put it to my ear, silence. The worst sound you want to hear when you're alone and need 911 immediately. Eventually I took a breath and went slow to see what was happening and finally noticed it was automatically sending the call.
I find this kind of crap all over the place in Android - buttons dancing around or changing function so idiotically that it almost feels like my phone is intentionally trying to trip me up.
The designers also seem stuck under an assumption the user is operating in an act-look feedback loop. In reality, good tools let you shift your focus away from them once you become proficient - the mechanics of their use becomes second nature and fades into the background allowing you to focus on your task - exactly the way you found yourself relying on muscle memory in that razor-focused, high stakes situation.
I'm saying this not only as a lifelong tech nerd, but from lived experience as a First Responder (where we routinely deal with high-stress situations, and aim to train with our equipment until it's too familiar to get wrong). It's unconscionable they'd ship such an inconsistent behavior in a function that is at once critical and rarely-exercised.
The problem wasn't you, it was your shoddily designed tool.
Remember that most of the technology industry today is primarily an ad delivery platform - either current one (aka there are ads there already), or a future one (so even areas where there aren’t ads yet aren’t safe).
Designers want you to always be in an act-look loop, because then you’ll either look at the ad which is already there, or at the very least generate more “engagement” which pumps up their analytics numbers (translates to promotions/salary) and ultimately translates to more ads (the company can now pitch this high-engagement screen real estate to the highest bidder).
The era where computers/technology did things as their primary function appears to be just a happy accident. It’s only a matter of time before you get ads for health insurance while you dial 911.
Is there a "no" missing?
2022: https://www.xda-developers.com/google-pixel-3-update-emergen...
Those silly humans really should separate the police from their emergency services
Between Pixel 2/4/8 (yeah yeah what can I say I'm a masochist), I had problems with out-of-focus pictures, widely inaccurate GPS, and my absolute favorite making a call which would dial the number and then about a second later immediately hang up.
I had a brief fling with using an iPhone but the speech-to-text dictation was absolute GARBAGE DAY and I make pretty heavy use of that feature while walking my dog.
The only updates for Windows are oriented around extracting more data or as revenue or integrated Microsoft product annoyances. Bugs are ignored for YEARS sometimes, major updates with huge issues get fired off with casual abandon.
Google is less openly hostile, but I get the very strong feeling that the android and pixel teams are about 6 people a piece. Like software in very deep maintenance mode. What bothers me most about this is less "android never receives big changes or major features" but instead "android/pixel has a big list of obvious bugs and has for a VERY long time, and they never get acknowledged ,much less fixed."
The camera app video judder saga is a prime example. (https://reddit.com/comments/1o1i5hi) How the HELL has nobody noticed and fixed this over there? Why is a random community member being forced to deal with this? Honestly pathetic work from Alphabet.
Also, in the Google Message app used for sending text messages, when you have 2 SIMs from the same carrier in your phone, you can't tell through which one you got the SMS (if this is a message to which you can't reply, e.g., an advertisement). You get the carrier name instead of the SIM card name which you set up in the settings. This is not specific to Pixels.
RCS is a joke. Either "your device doesn't support" it, or "your carrier doesn't support" it, or there are other issues. Nobody cares about their RCS, the entire planet uses WhatsApp, or iMessage, because they just work, unlike RCS.
Silly issues. That's Google in all their glory. They can do magic that serves billions of people, but they are unable to polish the edges.