Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency
androidauthority.com
androidauthority.com
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.
911 is one of those things that absolutely must work and most phones will allow you through using any available network if you are out of range of your primary carrier.
The fact that this is unreliable on any mobile phone is completely unacceptable.
Some Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) also give zero shits about call answer time, NG911, 911 via text, or even consistently working E911.
E911 provides a static address to the public safety answering point when a 911 call comes in. NG911 enriches this with more accurate latitude longitude and height above ground level data, or for phones that are in a fixed location a room number or extension number can be provided to make it much easier for a routing emergency services.
We need a national system for 911, not this mishmash of 10 to 30-year-old proprietary systems serving the 5700 PSAPs put together for each department on a township, city or county basis, with minimal coordination across regions and states.
Revoking all of their FCC approvals will fix this problem, and right quick.
Use of the PCS cellular spectrum is conditioned on several things; spectrum purchase by a carrier is necessary but not sufficient. Correctly-functioning emergency calling is one of the other conditions.
I’m surprised you kept the phone. I would have gotten a new phone if I discovered my current one couldn’t dial 911 properly.
And I've only used my mobile phone since my late 20's, it is not like I buy smartphones for emergency purposes.
How strange. That's the main reason I expect most people (especially on HN) would own a mobile phone at all. The ability to be contactable/make contact in an emergency is the greatest value it holds, surely?
Now I only have a smartphone because it is more convenient than a landline one, that it serves multiple purposes (navigation system, music player, compact camera, voice recorder, web browser, wallet...) and because banks in europe are making it a requirement if you don't want to go in line to their office or an ATM for basic things.
It is not like it would serve much for emergency purposes because I rarely have any cell coverage when I would need it the most[1]
I wonder how the Pixel 4 passed it. Not just in the US, but in many countries.
T-Mobile has had manufacturers brick band 12 on phones like the Moto E because you would get rural data coverage with this band, but T-Mobile did not sell any Moto phones and did not want to write a software config for VoLTE for Motorola phones. Without band 12 enabled the phone will happily roam onto AT&T or Verizon in areas where T-Mobile doesn't offer GSM service instead of hanging out on a cellular network that can never provide calling or texting at that location.
Small point, but many (most?) countries support 112, and it's definitely worth knowing as "911" likely won't work outside of the US.
The Pixel 6 (Pro and non-Pro) is a great example of an improperly tuned LTE/5G NR modem. Cellular connectivity was unreliable as could be, and the random No Network issue seemed consistent across T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T, meanwhile a Pixel 7 or any other phone is stable and able to call/use data when this is occuring.
If this were a Samsung phone, it is likely their internal engineering could have identified the Exynos modem issue and pushed a patch, but no one at Google was familiar with the modem they bought from Samsung and they certainly have little leverage over 'em to get issues like this resolved.
I was manually entering the number on the dial pad, and the call would never initiate.
Finally, I created a dummy contact with the number and then it finally worked.
I now have a phone that isn't a phone.
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 call it just disappeared from my watch. Totally useless!
There should really be a hard-to-accidentally-accept confirmation dialog for any kind of automated emergency dial feature. This is ridiculous because this is probably the 3rd time this has happened to me.
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?
Software engineers will fight tooth and nails to keep their privilege is being called engineers whilst having none of the responsibility when it comes to the harm they're causing.
Stop trotting out the same baseless comment over and over.
Let me know if find answers to my questions.
And many software engineering contracts contain liability clauses.
I don’t think things will change until corporate management changes (via being forced to, or otherwise).
For what it's worth, every telco switch upgrade I performed ages ago, early days of GSM the first number I tested was 911. I made sure the dispatcher could hear me. I don't know whats going on with the phone development side of things. That seems like a QA and customer feedback review problem. It probably also does not help that wireless vendors are slow/hesitant to update phones. There is a fear of bricking phones and customer support nightmares their words, not mine. I could flash update a phone over the air but this was in the 90's. No idea what that process looks like now. I assume they stage an update on a CDN after hopefully testing it extensively. Do all cell phones have two boot partitions in the event the upgrade process is sub-optimal(c)?
- Modern software is way too overcomplicated to take seriously.
- 911 is handled too specially, leading to oversights by implementers.
- Feature importance to you has nothing to do with implementation difficulties.
The ironic thing is personally I only upgrade my phone every 5+ years and would be totally happy with longer development cycles.
The only reliable way to test 911 features is a test lab, to which the average engineer doesn't have access to. On top of that, calling 911 isn't exactly as placing a normal call - so the only way to test is... to call 911.
Again, a test lab should help towards these things, but I doubt Google has one accessible to the average engineer working on the dialer. Plus, they most likely don't have a way to automatically test these changes - or they might happen as part of other "features" (remember the Microsoft Teams bug that caused similar issues?).
In the end, the smarter our smartphones become - the dumber they are at doing the one single thing they were initially meant to do - get help in case of an emergency.
And why not? It seems like the real real problem is #4: Management doesn't take seriously people's need to reach emergency services because it's not a profit center.
Considering the amount of teams working on the Google Dialer, and the fact that they might be distributed across multiple cities / countries - this sounds very expensive.
We've been talking about the cost of making a screened room. "Turnkey" ones cost about $20-50k, but you're going to pay contractors a fair bit beyond that. Not to mention whatever equipment you're putting inside.
https://www.ramayes.com/Refurbished_Radio_Frequency_Shielded...
And if you don't like that option - you can also place test calls to 911 [2] by calling their non-emergency number and arranging a time. It would be easy to perform a once-a-month test call.
[1] https://jretest.com/product/jre-1812f-forensics-analysis-enc... [2] https://www.911.gov/calling-911/frequently-asked-questions/
A screened room with a few devices and a simulator seems like a good resource to have, and it's a reasonable thing to procure at a center or two if they don't have it. It just costs several tens of thousands, not $10k.
It seems like at this point 911 usually works on Pixel, and there's probably even good unit test and automated integration test of a lot of the components-- prearranged test calls with a given carrier's 911 impl isn't likely to fix it. But "usually" isn't good enough: Google needs to actually figure out what's going on, no matter what.
c.f. my comment:
> > > It shouldn't be too expensive, but
People just don't read and understand that you can agree with the broader scope of comment but not the details.
Yes, so being able to use the phone UI is important for qualitative testing.
> I don't understand why you're trying to shift the blame away from Google. That's just stupid.
I feel like you didn't read my comment. I stated that a screened room isn't prohibitively expensive, but can't be delivered for the suggested $10k. In another comment, I said "Society spends a few billion dollars a year on E911 and related infrastructure. To have faith in it eroded because of a little bit of slipshod validation by phone vendors is a false economy."
Why isn't it possible to have nuanced discussions-- to condemn Google's failure here, but also to suggest that the capital expense to give people realistic test environments is probably higher than others are suggesting?
Frankly, you're being abrasive.
No, you're trying to find a way to make it sound impossible. But what you're saying is more along, probably, "finding a parking lot to test brakes is impossible even for a car company". Something real stupid as that.
But you're too boiling over in vitriol to understand nuance. Somehow, in your mind, saying that you can't do it for $10k appears to be me defending Google.
They noticed cell phone reviews over time have dropped signal or quality testing. Which makes sense since each reviewer is just testing in their local environment with no standards or baseline so they were pretty meaningless anyways.
Are they going to be able to test enough phones and wifi/radio equipment to make it worth while? Not too sure.
To have faith in it eroded because of a little bit of slipshod validation by phone vendors is a false economy.
You should be able to use 933 to test emergency services. https://support.bandwidth.com/hc/en-us/articles/210291778-Th...
And by that I mean the emergency mode of the modems
Alternatively, I think you can somehow connect the device antenna to your equipment, so that the signal doesn't even have to be transmitted over the air (or at the scale of a femtocell). Still, rather "expensive" to setup in multiple locations for just a team that develops a dialer.
Additionally, you'd have to test this across multiple OS versions, and devices. Still doable, but most likely not incentivized by the managers at Google
And selling phones that can't pass certification is just irresponsible. If you can't make a product work, you're free to be responsible and cancel a product. It's on Google to do businesses legally.
I suspect that the problem must be more complex than a bug in just the phone or the OS; for one thing, the problem is intermittent and doesn’t affect every phone. Still, the lack of action from the FCC is disturbing.
Ultimately with a system like 911, you will always have to do final testing on the real deal. Because this is just too serious to get wrong.
but if that would be my implementation I would track call in some very simple way and if that's second or third try to call 911 within hour then handle it as ordinary call without that extra functionality as a safeguard
not absolving Google, but this is easier said than done
There's enough 911 calls for everyone, they're just not distributed equally.
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 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
I wish I could tell you. As far as I can tell, there's no way, either on my watch or my phone, to figure out retroactively why it automatically dialed 911.
I know the Emergency SOS feature allows dialing 911 with some sequence of power button presses, but I don't think I was pressing the crown on my watch at the time.
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.
you can turn it off in settings. it's a good idea but sadly too easy to do if you're trying to turn the volume down instead for example.
also, even if it's awkward, stay on the line and explain. they usually appreciate it.
And then when I called months back I got an answering machine and waited what felt like an eternity (was one minute) to be routed to someone who then routed me elsewhere after determining what my needs were.
I worked on dialer for pixel and and am deeply familiar with these problems. Voice call tech is easily one of those mostly worthlessly convoluted spaces in mobile. That being said while I was there we put a huge priority on emergency calling — however the exec overseeing the space often complained about how hard dialer was and bemoaned all the required work because it never helped her promotions.
Dropped calls etc. do happen for a variety of reasons, but there have been next to no reports of iPhones being unable to dial 911 (assuming a decent cell signal, etc.), and that would be a much more serious issue.
Whilst this may be true for normal voice, almost universally emergency calling is the highest network priority[0], knocking other voice and data sessions off another carriers tower if required.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_telephone_number#Eme...
This is true for many young people. Turns out phone calls are pretty much the only time the earpiece speaker gets used on a phone. Lots of people have killed their earpiece speaker by filling it with sand, salt, water, lint, etc. Speakers seem to die more easily when never used, presumably because use vibrates dirt out. End result: When they call 911 they can't hear anything.
My phone currently has a dead earpiece speaker, and I just know that if I need to call 911, it better be on speakerphone.
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.
Nexus 4, Pixel 2 XL, Pixel 4 XL, Pixel 6 Pro – never had any issues whatsoever, all phones still alive and kicking at my grandparents' places. Yes, most of them tied to the wall now... but hey, they're fine for showing some photos and displaying current time or setting alarms.
Interestingly, I also used Samsung's Note 9 and 10+, iPhone 12, iPhone 14 Pro Max – daily, also with no issues... other than disliking Samsung's software.
(I was/am doing a lot of mobile work so I test a lot of phones)
After years of doing this kind of testing, it's hard for me to believe that the entire batches of phones are so fundamentally broken... I'd rather bet on software issues, but who knows.
(we can keep the anectodal evidence going, but not sure what's the value in that. People clearly have different experiences, and the selection of people reading comments about a Pixel issue is likely far from random).
I contacted support after not seeing spares were being sold. They gave me an 25$ store credit… Ended up selling the case and working earbud and getting a different brand.
Recently changed phones and them pulling the headphone jack from the A series after the 5 was a non-starter for me. I still use wired headphones and plug my aux into my car and other places :/ kinda mind boggling
* Can’t power it off for the night, because the flaky power button turns it back on.
* Can’t pull the SIM card, because emergency calls don’t require a SIM card to connect.
* Can’t consistently use the “slide to cancel” option, as the phone was also trying to initialize the camera at the same time. (IIRC, 3 button presses for the camera, 5 button presses for SOS. The flaky power button managed to trigger SOS while the camera was still initializing the GUI, so the camera GUI took focus.)
* Can’t access the settings, because the flaky power button either turns the phone off, opens the camera, or sends an SOS faster than I could search the settings.
This all started at about 10 PM. So, instead of going to sleep, I needed to spend the next two hours baby-sitting my phone as it mostly was repeatedly rebooting, with occasional calls to 911, until the battery finally died.
Two or my four smartphones have been Samsungs and, while I could call 112 on purpose, I don't know what might cause pocket dialing. Your comment about this being a feature rather than a bug on Pixels is funny though =)
I never used to lock my phone at all, but starting with the Pixel 3a I've been forced to do it by the fact that the phone interprets rubbing against my leg through my pocket as a stream of commands. I wish manufacturers would go back to the non-crazy screens they used to make. Anyway, since locking the phone doesn't disable the ability to call 911, this is a constant risk, though I don't believe I've made an accidental call yet. (Or maybe I would have, if my phones weren't Pixels!)
I have mangled a text note I was keeping on my phone beyond recovery when I once put my phone in my pocket without manually locking it first.
But my question was: what is the it that your phone has? I don't have such a button on my lock screen. There's a camera and a flashlight shortcut (too few shortcuts for my liking but better than bare android with zero shortcuts)
They probably just can't be bothered to set it up tbh.
Edit: hitbox not hotbox...
I know this part is supposed to be fixed, but it's insane that this was part of the problem.
I'm also not surprised to read that Teams was to blame, because Skype had the same functionality back in the days.
I hate how Apple infantilizes the user, but at least they have vision of making a product. Not a collection of promotion producing ideas.
But more seriously, they do spend a lot of money and effort marketing those features and it must work well enough to be worth it.
I think grapheneOS the best choice if you don't tolerate a proprietary OS on your smartphone.
Disclaimer: Pixel 3a support on GrapheneOS is EOL, but you can still download it and install it.
Some observations:
- I have not had any calls dropped.
- I don't remember a case where I couldn't get mobile data while being in an urban area. At least LTE and 3G work well.
- UI is snappy.
- You can install Google Play Services in a sandbox, but some apps, notoriously most banking apps, crash on launch, probably because they implement Play Integrity API.
- If you install Google Play Services in the sandbox, Whatsapp messages arrive instantly. If you don't, they do sometimes, sometimes they take some time, and sometimes you need to launch the app to see the messages.
- The default apps lack a cohesive UI appearance. The photo gallery looks as if it was taken from a 7 year old Android version. The clock app and settings app look up to date. The SMS app looks different from all the other apps mentioned.
- The default app icons are in black and white, which doesn't look bad in itself, but your app list screen looks ugly when you start installing other apps whose icons are not black and white.
- I don't remember a case of system apps crashing or the whole OS getting frozen in the 10 months that I've used it. And I don't remember feeling frustration because of system unresponsiveness.
Fortunately I had the local police station number and was able to call that just fine, but not until a few failed attempts at the real emergency number.
That said, another good option is attempting to call 112. Which is an emergency number in many countries. (Works in the US too).
But yeah, it's not good.
> 112. Which is an emergency number in many countries.
There's a lot of the planet where 112 will work, often as a redirect to the actual number.
The keyboard was spamming gibberish, eg NN nZzz1457_+-5hhhsvb .... etc
It took me a while to figure out why the phone appeared possessed...
These are some of the reasons I've seen for why:
-the regulation isn't sufficiently flexible to allow the company to build it in a way that makes the most sense for their system
-for the same reason testing, user research and feedback largely don't matter
-the projects are led by legal or compliance teams who are generally terrible at building features
-the feature isn't requested by customers so the company has very limited dialogue with the user about it
-the feature will not make money so no one at the company is incentivized to build it well or spend time on it
We do see poor e911 implementation at other software companies (twilio, five9, etc)
In the B2B world, we often had weird requests e.g. to take over the whole phone experience and do something different – this was made possible by the same core Android SDKs that they ship both to business devices and personal devices.
For example, we were required to move each 911 call to our app first, then check if we can route it quicker through the internal PBXs, and if not – send it back to the native/built-in dialer. This was possible a couple of years ago, we built it. I assume it's still possible because it's really rare that you need this kind of functionality... releasing such an app also requires a special review from Google. Maybe Google sees it as a low risk to the user experience and allows some apps to still do it, at least until something like this issue happes.
But I feel like it should be a crime to ignore a known issue like this.
Pressing the power button 5 times dials the emergency service number by default, so I've almost called emergency services a few times already. I usually manage to cancel it before it dials, but wow.
When I click the power button 5x, a screen appears with:
- A large circle in the middle of the screen, which I have to press and hold for 3 seconds to initiate the call.
- A slider to cancel the screen entirely
So just hitting the powerbutton 5x does not actually make the call on Pixel 7a, just makes it easier.
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.
Just saying, I've used only Android phones since 2009 or so, and I've never once had a problem with the phone functionality. It's not like this is some problem with Android in general.
More generally, though, using different code paths for emergency dialing is the root of the problem in the first place—you want to minimise special handling of things like this, because less-tested paths are much more likely to be buggy. Consider also: error handling code is pretty much the buggiest out there, because it’s seldom tested.
Once the software notices one of these numbers dialled call handling will go a completely different code path than normal calls.
I have no idea how things work in Android, where you obviously must have VoIP hooks?
Yes, there's emergency IMS (basically volte/vonr version of SIP) profiles the phone is supposed to register to and all the carriers towers advertise emergency numbers in their signaling.
The problem is when the internet connection is not so stable, and thus VoLTE doesn't work that well. The safer option would be to drop to 3G or even 2G if available to complete emergency calls.
We need to forget about falling back to 3G or 2G as that is not a viable solution in the long run. The carriers and phone manufactures have a responsibility to make emergencies calls work well over VoLTE.
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.
Issue type is equipment and send the comaint about it to your carrier. The carrier will then put pressure on Google directly.
https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/1150022...
Certainly this could be implemented with a feedback system, in order to guarantee access to emergency services?
I have trouble believing this hasn’t caused a death. And someone at google knows about it. They should be held responsible.
For example, the WP would progressively disable things to keep the phone on for as long as possible. At 2am, after a night out, I'd usually be the only one who had a working phone to call a cab (pre-uber days) -- but that was the last feature to stop working before it died. IIRC, you could disable this functionality, but I don't know why you would want to.
Starting to believe it is a T-Mobile service issue in my area. Previously had a pixel 2 on Verizon and never had a problem. Planning to leave T-Mobile in the near future.
Phone calls sound much better than my previous carrier (some cheap mvno) and things generally Just Work.
Only complaint is that it's missing some things I hadn't realized were not stock Android, such as per-app volume control. I just might switch back to LG after this one dies, though the battery seems to be holding up much better so who knows.
Do you use wifi calling when you are at home? It has been my experience that T-Mobile WiFi calling is absolutely terrible, and I've oftentimes wondered if something in the software "locks" into WiFi instead of switching to cellular data, until the phone is rebooted.
Sometimes it'll work fine for a while after leaving and a few hours later I notice I don't have service.
I'm in the Northeast USA on T-Mobile. You?