Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

androidauthority.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 275 posts

Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

#71

Post by exabrial »

When I had a Pixel4, I witnessed a car accident in which someone got hurt quite substantially.

Hard as a tried, the process of dialing 911 failed multiple times; the phone app simply crashed and left me with a blank screen or the home screen. I put a complaint in with my carrier but nothing was ever done. And of course Google could give 0 fucks with their customer support.

A few months later, I needed to call 911 for an emergency and it did work, but yeah... we got "Eventual Consistency" for an emergency.

Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

#72

Post by srmatto »

minitoar wrote: post #69
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #65

Funny, because I have the opposite problem. My Pixel dials 911 out of random and I always have to race to disconnect the call. Just last night my Pixel Watch started ringing out of random while I was eating dinner and it said it was dialing 911. I saw a phone call pop up on my Pixel 6 phone but fortunately canceled it before it connected. My watch didn't even tell me why it dialed 911, and once I disconnected the cal…

I think a confirmation dialog would defeat the purpose of an auto dial here — you need the auto dial because you have been incapacitated.

Apple's approach is to give you some fixed amount of time to cancel before it auto-dials an emergency number.

Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

#73

Post by postalrat »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #65

Funny, because I have the opposite problem. My Pixel dials 911 out of random and I always have to race to disconnect the call. Just last night my Pixel Watch started ringing out of random while I was eating dinner and it said it was dialing 911. I saw a phone call pop up on my Pixel 6 phone but fortunately canceled it before it connected. My watch didn't even tell me why it dialed 911, and once I disconnected the cal…

How are you doing this? Dialing an emergency has never happened to me by accident on Android or iOS.

It has happened to me many times on office phones where you need to use 9 to route your call. And you learn to just stay on the call if you dial me mistake because they will call back if you disconnect and telling them it was a mistake if much quicker. They must deal with it all the time

Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

#74

Post by shawnz »

nneonneo wrote: post #6

This article is about an incident from just last month, but the fact that there are 20+ failure reports over just Feb 2022-Jan 2023 ( https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/y039zn/i_compi... ), across multiple Pixel models, is insane. There’s something seriously wrong here.

Is there any data on how often this occurs with other brands, or what the failure rate was (i.e. how many attempts to call 911 succeeded in that time?) Otherwise 20+ reports certainly sounds bad but I don't really have a perspective on how bad it is. It could very well be that 20 failures across a year is within the expected failure rate due to unavoidable transient network issues.

Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

#75

Post by psanford »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #65

Funny, because I have the opposite problem. My Pixel dials 911 out of random and I always have to race to disconnect the call. Just last night my Pixel Watch started ringing out of random while I was eating dinner and it said it was dialing 911. I saw a phone call pop up on my Pixel 6 phone but fortunately canceled it before it connected. My watch didn't even tell me why it dialed 911, and once I disconnected the cal…

Turn off Emergency SOS on your watch and phone.

Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

#76

Post by rkagerer »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #65

Funny, because I have the opposite problem. My Pixel dials 911 out of random and I always have to race to disconnect the call. Just last night my Pixel Watch started ringing out of random while I was eating dinner and it said it was dialing 911. I saw a phone call pop up on my Pixel 6 phone but fortunately canceled it before it connected. My watch didn't even tell me why it dialed 911, and once I disconnected the cal…

Jeez - can't dial 911, randomly dials 911.

I don't understand why these devices can't even do the most core feature of a phone properly.

This will sound crass but the development teams (right up to CEO's) should be dragged out to the gallows and flogged.

If it was my product I would have made damn sure the 911 experience was perfect before shipping, and not rested for a minute until any bugs were solidly quashed - up to and including recalling all sold units and overhauling the flakey architecture if needed.

This is life safety we're talking about, not only for their users but also everyone else impacted by their blatent abuse of the emergency services system. Would we tolerate bridges that collapsed with equally ambivalent consequences for those who engineered them?

Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

#77

Post by yolovoe »

I used to have a Pixel 2 XL and then later a Pixel 5a. Went through them really fast as the hardware was pretty bad and the phone would just decide to stop turning on at some point. Same thing happened to a relative I gave a Pixel 5a. Phone didn't last a year.

Don't get me started on the Pixel buds. I got tired of contacting customer support for replacements.

That's when I decided not to buy hardware from Google again, and also stopped using Android. Experience in iPhone has been great so far. Phone's fast despite being several generations behind, don't have to worry about not getting security updates.

Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

#78

Post by OtomotO »

postalrat wrote: post #73
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #65

Funny, because I have the opposite problem. My Pixel dials 911 out of random and I always have to race to disconnect the call. Just last night my Pixel Watch started ringing out of random while I was eating dinner and it said it was dialing 911. I saw a phone call pop up on my Pixel 6 phone but fortunately canceled it before it connected. My watch didn't even tell me why it dialed 911, and once I disconnected the cal…

How are you doing this? Dialing an emergency has never happened to me by accident on Android or iOS. It has happened to me many times on office phones where you need to use 9 to route your call. And you learn to just stay on the call if you dial me mistake because they will call back if you disconnect and telling them it was a mistake if much quicker. They must deal with it all the time

After I retired my last smartphone, a Nokia something, the same thing happened. I used it purely as a mp3 player when walking the woods and it would randomly call the emergency line (not 911 in my country)

I barely could cancel the call before it went through as of course I was walking and had headphones in.

I figured it had something to do with a button... it got more annoying over time so what I did to fix it was: change the emergency number to my girlfriend`s

Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

#79

Post by fluidcruft »

All cell phones with 911 functionality should have a way to periodically test that the 911 feature is fully functional. The reality is that I rarely even make a phone call anymore... but I don't even know whether being able to make a call implies 911 works? And I don't know if its still true but there used to be pretty significant fines for calling 911 so I'm not just going to dial 911 and say "making sure this still works!" The phone should just be doing various deadman switch type tests on the network/911 health-checks and report to me whether it is working or not working. It has a freaking GPS and can identify cell towers, so it should be pretty trivial to maintain test data and schedule. Relying on life-critical devices that can't be tested seems really sketchy.

Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

#80

Post by _trampeltier »

NonAnonCoward wrote: post #14

My experience has been Pixel phones suck for calls in general. I know of 3 people with Pixel 3As that intermittently can’t receive calls. Often it takes 2-3 calls to these people in order to get 1 to go through. Setting the phones to prefer 4G has so far fixed the problem most reliably but the whole calling stack on pixel phones needs some work IMO.

I have a Samsung Note10+ and I also have to try often 2 times to make a call. The first time there is mostly no Sound.
Post reply on HN