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Comment by postalrat | Hacker News Reader

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

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Happened to me twice with an iPhone. Both times I triggered it when the phone was lagging for some reason (eg it got too hot and throttled down). I guess iOS doesn't track the delay between button presses properly when it's overloaded. I was able to cancel the call in time, but it's a horrifying seeing the timer go down while mashing the non-responsive stop button.

Sounds about right, considering how many accidental screenshots I've taken during lag when I press the two buttons involved in the combo a few seconds apart.

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

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

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.

I had my Pixel 5 dial 911 once at random. There was a tiny piece of debris stuck in the power button that triggered the call. A couple of blasts with a compressor and this hasn't happened since.

I had the same issue with my Pixel 5. I booked an uber one time and suddenly it dialed 911. Have to switch off the phone. Most tensed 30 mins of last winter. Later figured out the issue with power button; works fine till now.

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.

In iOS 17, there are two related settings for this is under Settings Emergency SOS.

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