I dropped my Pixel in water and since it had previously cracked, it had lost the waterproofing. The water apparently shorted the power button and the screen. That was a fun night when the dead phone woke up and started dialling 112 repeatedly and there was nothing I could do short of smashing the damn thing with a hammer to stop it.
Every electronic device needs to have a physical disconnect for the power supply. It should be considered a severe enough fault to warrant not getting market approval if this is missing.
I had a similar issue - the glass on the back of my Pixel (5 I think?) cracked right by the power button, and it seemed to be kind of OK but I got a new phone anyway, but left the old one in my glove box of my car where I used it for the bluetooth entry to the parking garage at work (and because re-enrolling was a pain). It didn't have the sim setup or wifi enabled so didn't think much of it.
This worked fine for a few months, just turning it on at the gate then off afterwards and threw it back in the glove compartment.
Until one day driving home I heard a weird beeping, then a voice from the glove box asking what my emergency was. I shouted back pulling over and fumbling to get the phone out, and told the responder my phone had called them by itself. I was a little surprised as I thought every call, even abandoned, had to be followed up on, in case there was coercion? But I guess not if you just blame the phone. I guess the buttons had shorted to turn the phone on, then ended up going into the emergency call? I couldn't even turn it off at that point as the power button refused to work and the digitizer was partially non-functional.
A bit of a pain, and a (hopefully small) waste of an emergency responder's time, but I can see this sort of thing being relatively common - in "normal use" I've had my phone somehow end up on the emergency call menu, just being jostled and unlocked or fat fingering the wrong buttons, so wouldn't be surprised if unneeded emergency calls are relatively common on even fully functional devices.
But I guess that cost is worth paying if it's more convenient and quick when there is an emergency?
In Germany it is not possible to call emergency without an active SIM (if it is PIN protected, the PIN has to be entered before). This has been deliberately disabled since February 2009 because there were too many anonymous calls for fun or (how idiotic!) to test if a secondhand phone still works.
I also had a pixel begin to boot then make 911 calls upon getting moisture in it. I damaged the sim slot prying it out so it wouldn't dial 911 any more.
I figured my experience was a freak occurrence - how is this a (n=2) failure mode when getting wet!?
>> That was a fun night when the dead phone woke up and started dialling 112 repeatedly and there was nothing I could do short of smashing the damn thing with a hammer to stop it.
> Just put it in a Faraday cage. Problem solved.
Even if I don't have a hammer handy, I could probably find something in the middle of the night to smash the thing. A Faraday cage on the other hand...
I had to disable the shortcuts on my iPhone because the toddler had discovered hold to dial 911 and talk to the nice lady.
Luckily I caught it before it became like the other case I heard of, where a kid learned he could get a fire truck to visit anytime he was bored and had a phone.
Same has happened here with our 2-year old, except we didn't get to it in time and have had the fire department show up on more than one occasion before we figured out what was happening.
There were also a handful of times we could hear a voice coming through the wife's phone where we narrowly avoided a few more visits.
This was all before we discovered how she actually calling 911. It's shocking to me Google didn't make more of a deal about this new "feature" when they rolled it out.
This definitely should have been opt-IN, not opt-out. Sure smells like a classic example of tech PMs making idealistic decisions that affect people in the real world without thinking through all of the consequences.
I start dialing 911 on my iphone when I think I’m turning the volume up but it doesn’t seem to be getting louder. Turns out I pressed the lock button N times and it starts dialing.
Years of iphone and I’m still not quick at blindly figuring out which set of buttons I’m touching.
> Luckily I caught it before it became like the other case I heard of, where a kid learned he could get a fire truck to visit anytime he was bored and had a phone.
Reminds me of the kid's book where a young girl (kindergarten age) really has to use the bathroom but can't find it so she calls 911 because she was taught "call 911 if and only if there is an emergency".
This is anecdotal but the same exact thing (albeit with an Apple Watch vs. Android) happened to me a few days ago- I had forgotten to turn on the watch's water mode before going in the water. After about like 5 minutes in the pool it started calling 911 for a medical emergency. My watch ended up calling 911 about 3 times (it probably tried to call them about 5 more times but I ended up taking it off in time to prevent those calls- since it wasn't responding to my inputs at all). I also got a call from the Sheriff's office a little bit later and had to sheepishly explain that my watch was spam calling 911.
Still unsure what happened with it exactly, but whatever was triggering it to do this seemed to not simply be due to water on the screen since it tried to call 911 again even when I put the watch back on hours later after it had dried. I have since power cycled it a few times and let it run out of battery and it hasn't tried getting me arrested for spoof calling 911 again, so that's promising.
I was swimming in a local lake last summer when I heard a faint voice from my watch. I look and it had unhelpfully called 911 and I was being asked what my emergency was.
These are not the same category of product in the same way that a smartphone and a rotary phone are not the same category of product, despite have words in their name in common.
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.)
I remember having an issue with a Nexus that I had a while back. I had a hard time getting the screen to turn on and stay on. Turns out, I had misapplied the screen protector and the proximity sensor was thinking that it was in a situation which it shouldn't turn on.
While it was my own doing, I can see many people having that problem to the point where Android turned off the functionality. Multiple support calls, requests to return "defective" phones, etc.
But yeah, I currently have the same issue. If my current Pixel 3a is in my slightly damp pocket, it will have tried to "monkey touching" as the post above called it.
Samsung devices appear to use the camera and/or the proximity sensor to display a "Your phone appears to be in a dark place, slide to unlock".
Unfortunately it seems easy to unlock that as well.
The biggest problems I have with this are related to the "raise to wake" and "tap to wake" features that seem to be enabled by default on all the phones I've tried including iOS devices. I think on Pixel it was called "pick up to check phone" or something else like that. Turning these off drastically reduces the number of times the phone turns on in my pocket because the power button becomes the only way to activate the screen.
On Samsung phones you additionally have to turn off a setting under Always-On display so that widgets are turned off and/or cannot receive touches, such as the music app etc.
This was my frustration with the Pixel 4 as well. So many random things done on my phone, including Amazon 1 Click purchases or random emails about to be sent, etc. All because the stupid thing somehow decides that the screen should be enabled in my pocket. However, if I'm making a call with the phone up to my ear and move it to look at it..."no screen for you!"
Don't believe it's only a phone thing. My Lenovo Thinkpad touchpad goes crazy as soon as my fingers are humid, be it from hand washing or sweating (hello, summertime). For some reason it will jump wildly around and also keep a mousedown event like forever then nothing will help: wiping it dry or crazy tapping or anything. Reboot it and it will work again - until the next wet touch.
I've had the exact same experience with my last two touchpads - including the reboot requirement to fix. Even disabling and reenabling the touchpad after cleaning it doesn't always solve the issue.
I think this is a touchscreen thing. If I take my phone in the shower and put it in a place where water splashes on it during the shower, it does all sorts of random stuff. Have to remember to set it to locked or else I might text someone or delete an email.
I have an insane story where walking in my wet swim trunks opened Instagram and sent a weird selfie from my gallery to multiple people via DM. Rather awkward.
If the screen is facing your leg you can get the capacitive touch to trigger. I learned this while snowboarding so I would have my screen facing outward, of course that puts it at higher risk of smashing though.
It isn't just a problem with Android. I volunteer for a small fire department. We respond to about 500 calls a year. Since January I can think of three times the automatic crash detection on iOS devices has called us out by mistake.
1) A person left their phone on their car and it fell off. Being a small town one of the volunteers was able to find the owner and bring them the phone.
2) A gps location in the middle of a lake. The best we figure is one of the people on a jet ski or wake boarding.
3) Some people jumping on a trampoline.
Each of these means 2-6 volunteers responding from home to the station and then spending 30-60 minutes driving around in large trucks looking for non-existent emergencies. Each call also gets an ambulance staffed with career paramedics.
On the other hand someone's Apple watch did call us and we found he had fallen and gotten stuck down in some bushes and did need our help.
There is lots of promise, but also the tax payers are footing the bill for the false positives, not to mention the added risk to responders.
For everyone blaming modern tech: The only time police have ever come to my house from a 911 call was back in the 90s. Some combination of a noisy phone line and a broken 900MHz cordless phone managed to call 911 and they followed up. They said not to worry, it happens all the time and was a notable portion of their calls.
These types of false calls have been happening for a long, long time. We should get more data and fix the system for sure -- but this isn't a new dynamic and the historic baseline before smartphones isn't zero.
Back in 1996, I was living in Almaden Valley (South San Jose) and we had underground utilities. We also lived on top of an underground stream.
After a rainstorm, water got in and intermittently shorted out the phone line. It was clicking like crazy!
I was on my cool new Motorola StarTAC talking with Pacific Bell to report the problem. Then I heard a loud knock on the door: "San Jose Police. Open up!"
I asked the officers what the problem was and they said "We got a 911 call with no one on the line. We tried to call you back, but no one answered. So we had to come out and investigate."
I invited them in and said, "I think I know what happened." They followed me over to the landline speakerphone in the kitchen and listened to the clicking.
Then I explained, "You remember the old rotary dial phones? They worked by making and breaking the circuit, just like this clicking. Even if we all have touch-tone phones these days, the phone lines are still compatible with the rotary dial. So somewhere in the midst of all this clicking, there were nine fast clicks in a row, and then one click, and one more. And that dialed 911. Sorry about that!"
I have to register my building's alarm with the county and pay a fine after 3 false alarms, or not register and the police won't respond. I also pay an annual registration fee.
I wonder if too many "smart" false alarms will lead to similar regulation.
In my city, monitored alarms aren't worthwhile for non-commercial properties. For the police to respond, your alarm has to be registered, and registration requires authorized first responders with keys to confirm that an alarm is false or valid before police are called/dispatched.
Once I was tucking to pick up speed and I must have accidentally held the side button down in my pocket. I didn't notice anything had happened until I got a call back asking if I was okay. (I did hear the countdown alarm that plays, but misattributed it to a snowmobile or other equipment at the ski resort.)
The second time I was also skiing and did actually fall. I was unhurt but I guess going fast enough to trigger the call. Unfortunately I couldn't get myself situated enough (gloves, zippered pocket, super steep hill) to cancel before the call went through.
The dispatchers were great in both cases. Asked me a few questions to make sure nobody in the area needed help and nothing else happened.
> A gps location in the middle of a lake. The best we figure is one of the people on a jet ski or wake boarding
How do you rule out BUI/drowning? It would suck to be given up on. Is there ever any information indicating the call was placed by a device?
A classmate of mine accidentally drove into a lake and drowned when GPS/E911 conflict dispatched responders to the wrong location. It's not a perfect system to begin with, and made worse by automatic dialers undermining responder trust.
I hate Apple as much as any other large tech company, but 1/4 true emergency rate seems like a pretty good start in cases where a person's life may be at risk!
Emergency services in my city (the one you call via phone) have a "true emergency" rate of about 1 in 10 according to emergency personnel I talked to, so it is always a matter of balancing the false positive/false negative rate.
911 is not well funded in the majority of the US. In many rural areas, one false call that requires EMS sent out could cause another person with a legitimate call to wait a hour or more.
I'm having an issue related to this right now actually. Some spec of dust or something must have gotten into the power button on my Pixel 4a, so very occasionally it'll jostle into such a position that every time I push the power button it registers as two presses. If I only press it once, it think I'm using the double-press shortcut to open the camera. This was mildly confusing the first few times it happened, but as I was trying to mess with it I triggered this emergency call shortcut (since it only requires 3 presses with this issue). Fortunately I noticed it the first time times it happened and was able to do the slide-to-cancel, so it avoided turning into a larger issue.
I've gotten it into a position where if this occurs I can blow near the power button which typically makes it go away for a day or so, but it was very scary walking around with the phone out before I understood the nature of the issue, because I wasn't sure if it would magically trigger the power button unprompted just sitting in my pocket. I've ordered a new phone (it was nearing time for an upgrade anyways) but I've yet to set it up, so I'm stuck with this for the time being.
I love Pixel phones, but stuff like this does seem to be a recurring issue. Sometimes my phone turns off and on again when I only press the power button once. Not a huge dealbreaker, just a pain to constantly have to think about.
I saw this happen to someone recently. Their phone was having other issues, so we were trying to reboot it, and Google changed which buttons you have to push to turn your phone off. You used to be able to just press the one button to turn the phone off, but now you have to press 2. So I think people might be pressing the power button a bunch of time now because they're trying to turn their phone off and don't realize you have to hold down 2 buttons now instead of one.
No, Google is not A/B testing the emergency dialer. What the previous commenter is referring to is a change in Android 12 where, by default, long-pressing the power button no longer brings up the power menu but rather the default Assistant app.
Not realizing that the way to bring up the power menu now is to either access it through Quick Settings or press the power + volume up buttons, the previous commenter's friend started pressing the power button multiple times. (Not blaming that friend, just summarizing what happened.)
Starting in Android 12 - hitting your power button 3 times in a row brings up the camera, five times in a row calls 911. Its not A/B testing thats for everyone.
iPhones have exactly the same feature, activated in almost the same way, except that it requires one fewer interactions with the device to trigger, and yet, there's no reporting about this happening too much with iPhones, nor was there any when the feature came out a few years ago.
Additionally, this doesn't seem to have been a problem when it rolled out on Pixel devices a year and a half ago, Pixels are certainly common enough for that to become a known issue.
Why is Android different? Why are third party Android devices seemingly so different?
> The funny thing is, Android 12 — and this easy emergency call feature — came out a year and a half ago. [...] the feature is only now hitting enough people to become a national problem. Google's Pixel devices get new Android updates immediately, but everyone else can take months or years to get new versions of Android [...]. When this landed on Pixel devices in 2021, it was immediately flagged as a problem by some people, with one Reddit post calling it "dangerous." Since then, there has been a steady stream of posts warning people about it.
It objectively has been a problem, and was a known issue, with Reddit posts warning others. There just weren't enough Pixels to cause this latest tsunami. That year-and-a-half delay from Samsung rolling out Android 12 was meant to be for testing - which apparently didn't catch everything.
I did read this but it doesn't feel convincing. People complain on Reddit about anything, and have complained about triggering this on iOS, and yet we don't get ArsTechnica (or the BBC, or other major news organisations) covering it as a widespread problem. There are plenty of Pixels, I'd expect enough to cause coverage if this was a substantial issue.
Increasing the accessibility of emergency calls is always going to be a tradeoff, so I'm not surprised there are accidental calls. However it strikes me as being significantly exacerbated by something about the phones it's rolling out to.
Seems obvious to me: Power is opposite Volume on Samsung Android phones, but not on Pixel. Easy to hit both buttons at once, and iPhone may do something special to detect that.
My Blackberry Android phone is the same, I remember having to train myself not to hit power when I first got it because my previous phone wasn't like this.
Apple seem to have lockscreen "keyboard mash detection" for macOS (where, if you are cleaning your keyboard and therefore mashing down keys as you swipe across them with a cloth, the OS will wake up and process the random inputs a while — until it detects that you've mashed 4+ function-row keys at once, at which point it'll just go back to sleep) so I wouldn't put it past them to have similar logic for iOS.
Ah! Good point. Yes on my iPhone if I press one or both volume buttons while pressing power 5 times it doesn't trigger, and yes on my Pixel the power button is above the volume button.
It seems strange that Samsung wouldn't do something to tackle this. Part of the point of Samsung and other OEMs taking ages to roll out new Android versions is that they're testing and ensuring compatibility.
Google made including the "emergency SOS" gesture a GMS requirement for Android 12 but left it up to OEMs to decide whether or not to enable it by default. I suspect this spike in emergency calls stems from a few factors:
1) Due to the general lag between Google pushing a new release out to AOSP and OEMs pushing out updates, many devices have only recently been updated to Android 12. OEMs with outsize market share pushing out updates will result in many more people - who probably don't know this gesture was added or how it's activated - accidentally triggering it.
2) Some OEMs may have flipped the switch in an OTA to turn the gesture from off by default to on by default.
I've had my Apple Watch detected me playing volley ball as having a serious fall, but it doesn't call until after a minute, and it makes quite a loud sound to notify the wearer that it's about to call.
It happens on iPhones and Watches as well, occasionally.
But if I remember correctly, the emergency call feature is something that is explicitly explained during the iOS/watchOS initial setup and/or upgrade procedure, at which point you can also elect to opt out, so at the very least, it's less of a surprise.
> Additionally, this doesn't seem to have been a problem when it rolled out on Pixel devices a year and a half ago, Pixels are certainly common enough for that to become a known issue.
It absolutely was a problem for me and I disabled it. I attach the phone to my car vent with an adapter and it slipped and when trying to adjust it called 911 twice while I was driving (couldn't pick up the first time).
How come such a critical shortcut be so unknown is a mystery to me. I can't imagine anyone ever used it intentionally.
Personally from my Samsung phone - it had enabled gestures by default. This allowed you to tap the screen a few times and it would present you with the lock screen which has the emergency call button. From personal experience - the phone will wake up and go into this menu if you sweat and have the phone in your pocket.
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Every electronic device needs to have a physical disconnect for the power supply. It should be considered a severe enough fault to warrant not getting market approval if this is missing.
This worked fine for a few months, just turning it on at the gate then off afterwards and threw it back in the glove compartment.
Until one day driving home I heard a weird beeping, then a voice from the glove box asking what my emergency was. I shouted back pulling over and fumbling to get the phone out, and told the responder my phone had called them by itself. I was a little surprised as I thought every call, even abandoned, had to be followed up on, in case there was coercion? But I guess not if you just blame the phone. I guess the buttons had shorted to turn the phone on, then ended up going into the emergency call? I couldn't even turn it off at that point as the power button refused to work and the digitizer was partially non-functional.
A bit of a pain, and a (hopefully small) waste of an emergency responder's time, but I can see this sort of thing being relatively common - in "normal use" I've had my phone somehow end up on the emergency call menu, just being jostled and unlocked or fat fingering the wrong buttons, so wouldn't be surprised if unneeded emergency calls are relatively common on even fully functional devices.
But I guess that cost is worth paying if it's more convenient and quick when there is an emergency?
So unless you actively intend to set your own car on fire I urge you to end this habit and send the broken phone to an adapted recycling procedure.
(This is also why unrelatedly to the many pollution issues, throwing lithium-ion into landfill is like setting up a time bomb for our kids)
https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/06/22/new-eu-law-to-forc...
I figured my experience was a freak occurrence - how is this a (n=2) failure mode when getting wet!?
> Just put it in a Faraday cage. Problem solved.
Even if I don't have a hammer handy, I could probably find something in the middle of the night to smash the thing. A Faraday cage on the other hand...
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.
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.
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".
Still unsure what happened with it exactly, but whatever was triggering it to do this seemed to not simply be due to water on the screen since it tried to call 911 again even when I put the watch back on hours later after it had dried. I have since power cycled it a few times and let it run out of battery and it hasn't tried getting me arrested for spoof calling 911 again, so that's promising.
I was swimming in a local lake last summer when I heard a faint voice from my watch. I look and it had unhelpfully called 911 and I was being asked what my emergency was.
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.
Unfortunately it seems easy to unlock that as well.
The biggest problems I have with this are related to the "raise to wake" and "tap to wake" features that seem to be enabled by default on all the phones I've tried including iOS devices. I think on Pixel it was called "pick up to check phone" or something else like that. Turning these off drastically reduces the number of times the phone turns on in my pocket because the power button becomes the only way to activate the screen.
On Samsung phones you additionally have to turn off a setting under Always-On display so that widgets are turned off and/or cannot receive touches, such as the music app etc.
This 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. :(
The sensor is prone to false positives, such as when you have the phone in a waterproof pouch while hiking or boating.
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.
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!"
I wonder if too many "smart" false alarms will lead to similar regulation.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
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.
I've gotten it into a position where if this occurs I can blow near the power button which typically makes it go away for a day or so, but it was very scary walking around with the phone out before I understood the nature of the issue, because I wasn't sure if it would magically trigger the power button unprompted just sitting in my pocket. I've ordered a new phone (it was nearing time for an upgrade anyways) but I've yet to set it up, so I'm stuck with this for the time being.
What the hell is wrong with these people? We are humans, not a data science project.
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.)
Additionally, this doesn't seem to have been a problem when it rolled out on Pixel devices a year and a half ago, Pixels are certainly common enough for that to become a known issue.
Why is Android different? Why are third party Android devices seemingly so different?
> The funny thing is, Android 12 — and this easy emergency call feature — came out a year and a half ago. [...] the feature is only now hitting enough people to become a national problem. Google's Pixel devices get new Android updates immediately, but everyone else can take months or years to get new versions of Android [...]. When this landed on Pixel devices in 2021, it was immediately flagged as a problem by some people, with one Reddit post calling it "dangerous." Since then, there has been a steady stream of posts warning people about it.
It objectively has been a problem, and was a known issue, with Reddit posts warning others. There just weren't enough Pixels to cause this latest tsunami. That year-and-a-half delay from Samsung rolling out Android 12 was meant to be for testing - which apparently didn't catch everything.
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.
My Blackberry Android phone is the same, I remember having to train myself not to hit power when I first got it because my previous phone wasn't like this.
Apple seem to have lockscreen "keyboard mash detection" for macOS (where, if you are cleaning your keyboard and therefore mashing down keys as you swipe across them with a cloth, the OS will wake up and process the random inputs a while — until it detects that you've mashed 4+ function-row keys at once, at which point it'll just go back to sleep) so I wouldn't put it past them to have similar logic for iOS.
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.
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.
https://gizmodo.com/iphones-false-911-calls-bonnaroo-android...
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.
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.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34157142