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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.
And the thing is, none of iPhones I had my hands on (since 4S maybe) have never failed me as phones. When I need to place or receive a call, the call is placed or received. No shenanigans with sound, microphone, connections. If there is a connection problem, I can be 100% sure it's the carrier. With Android, all bets are off. When Maemo was a thing, all bets were off, it could enter a 100% CPU-hogging busy loop during a call and you would be SOL, or you wouldn't be able to hang up, or some such shit.
The only other cellular thing that I could 100% rely on was my Nokia 1280 and a 1112 before it, but 2G networks are being wound down in my area, alas.
If Google employees actually used the phones they build we wouldn't have a lot of the issues we have them. I'm still annoyed that the little weather icon on the home screen has about a 2x2 pixel hitbox. Edit: hitbox not hotbox...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I had this happen with my iPhone a few years ago. Basically there’s a setting where some combination of the side buttons pressed together calls 911. I was in a borrowed car and the cup holder was just the right width to do this when I hit a bump. The very nice 911 operator told me it happened all the time. After the second time it happened I tracked down the setting to disable it.
It's really absurd how such a problem still exists. Couldn't a separate method be used for emergency calling? For example drop to 3g, don't use the dialer app but a separate "emergency" app.
Having dedicated code path for 911 is literally the problem. It makes it legally almost impossible to test in many countries (since in many countries you're not allowed to dial 911 if you don't have an emergency)
It's really absurd how such a problem still exists. Couldn't a separate method be used for emergency calling? For example drop to 3g, don't use the dialer app but a separate "emergency" app.
Having dedicated code path for 911 is literally the problem. It makes it legally almost impossible to test in many countries (since in many countries you're not allowed to dial 911 if you don't have an emergency)
But most places I've lived in the US had a non-emergency police number, and non-emergency 911 calls were very discouraged. If you have a good reason to make them for network or device testing, you'd just need to schedule a time to make a test call, stay on the line and tell the operator, etc.
Device development would be well served by using a tower simulator in a Faraday cage, as a sibling suggested. But a responsible developer would do a few tests on live networks during release acceptance testing.
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…