Issue dialing 911 on Google Pixel 6 cell phones

https://www.actionnewsjax.com/news/local/investigates-very-scary-cell-phone-issue-dialing-911/ZNT76HVHRRCB5AUVRTT7JL43DM/

by vpt • 4 years ago

330 240 4 years ago

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vpt• 4 years ago

Here is the associated Google Pixel subreddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/z3knqv/action_...

simfree3• 4 years ago

I don't think this is newsworthy at this point. My Pixel 6 and Pixel 7 both are unreliable when trying to call 911, calling with an over the top app or dialing the PSAP's number directly are the only workarounds.

Google doesn't give a fuck about this issue. I have filed repeated support cases over the past year with Google about this when using T-Mobile or Verizon.

creshal• 4 years ago

Google already didn't give a fuck about 911 problems (or 112 in my case) on the Pixel 4a, those have been unfixed since release.

Google doesn't seem to care that dead people don't make for good customers.

curiousgal• 4 years ago

Pixel 6 is the last Google phone I bought, after owning every single Pixel up until that point.

A company who fucks up this badly is not worth my money.

conradfr• 4 years ago

I would say a life or death years old bug still present in the newest model (on which I'm writing this) is newsworthy.

Although I'm not sure how there's no legal repercussion here?

fanatic2pope• 4 years ago

I have a Pixel 7, and I am curious how do you test the reliability of calling 911? I assume you don't actually call 911 and say "just testing!"

Aissen• 4 years ago

Most interesting is a user story[1] shared giving an idea of how often this happens: 3 times over 8 months, with ~5 calls a week. We could round it at around 1% error rate. It's both relatively low (as a chance it happens to you), and extremely high (I can't imagine how many people might have the issue and not be aware of it!).

I'm sure there are other conditions that aren't identified here, but this definitely warrants more regulatory scrutiny.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/z3knqv/comment...

karteum• 4 years ago

Is it a Google issue or a Qualcomm issue ? (e.g. does it occur when using Calyxos/GrapheneOS/LineageOS instead of the raw Google Android OS ?)

Freak_NL• 4 years ago

I have a Pixel 6 running GrapheneOS, and the one time I called 112 in the Netherlands it worked. Hard to extrapolate from that one data point though.

It's a bit of a bother that this is not something you can test at any reasonable scale. “Just testing if my call gets through” is not something you want to see inundating emergency call centres.

lesquivemeau• 4 years ago

112 worked for me in France when i had to call, pixel 6 running stock firmware... It sure is hard to reproduce

preisschild• 4 years ago

AFAIK this only occurs when you have Microsoft Teams installed.

hocuspocus• 4 years ago

The Pixel 6 has a Samsung SoC and 5G modem. If the Exynos based Samsung phones were also affected you'd have heard about it a lot more and earlier.

qqqturing2• 4 years ago

I had a Samsung 5G Exynos and when one time I couldn't call 112 (emergency number in Europe). Tried over and over. Even restarted my phone but the phone line was silent when it answered.

crooked-v3• 4 years ago

It's a side effect of that Android version letting apps register to take over calling functions (for, e.g., VOIP purposes). If any such app on the phone doesn't handle the emergency call case correctly, then the attempt fails in one way or another.

leereeves• 4 years ago

Why does Android allow apps to take over emergency calls?

izacus2• 4 years ago

Pixel 6 and 7 phones don't use Qualcomm hardware anymore - they use Samsung modems I think.

Aachen4• 4 years ago

Let's just spell it out instead of this clickbait title:

Dialing the local emergency number (112, 000, and 911 were reported, but presumably also others) sometimes doesn't work, just gives a click instead of dialing. Google blames third party apps. Users report similar issues since Pixel 4 that were reported to Google but haven't been resolved since release.

Not like "911 doesn't ring" is much longer of a title than "very scary issue with dialing 911". It just sounds ever so slightly less like a horror movie.

alpaca128• 4 years ago

Nothing about your explanation refutes that this is a very scary issue.

Third-party apps or not, a phone that can't call emergency services in every situation other than empty battery should be treated by the government like food that can potentially poison people.

throwaway2905• 4 years ago

you posit "911 doesn't ring sometimes" ∈ "very scary issue with a phone", that's correct

title implies "911 doesn't ring sometimes" ∈ "very scary issue dialing 911", that is incorrect

frankly "doesn't ring" is probably the most routine issue that can happen when dialing a number

the comment you respond to responds to article title and posits "911 doesn't ring sometimes" ∉ "very scary issue dialing 911"

Aachen4• 4 years ago

Nothing about your explanation refutes that this is a very scary issue.

That's great, because I didn't want to say that!

The point is that "something very scary happened" is less useful than "X happened" when everyone intuitively understands that situation X is very scary.

Third-party apps or not,

Maybe that's another misunderstanding: I think Google's excuse is lame. Perhaps you thought I cited it as a legitimate reason?

onion2k• 4 years ago

Google blames third party apps.

I'm not going to suggest third parties can't screw with a phone and make it effectively unusable, but why isn't emergency calling a separate code path in the dialler app and OS that just ignores everything that third parties have done? It should be impossible to change the behaviour of that small bit of the phone. Don't fire any OS level events, don't call any callbacks, ignore any registered intents.

This is on a Pixel. Google can have complete control of the OS and dialler if they want to. They should be able to effectively isolate this from the rest of the phone. Blaming third parties doesn't really explain it.

fourthark• 4 years ago

This link posted by crooked-v seems to explain why it was like that, and how it has been fixed.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/google-fixes-nightma...

Aachen4• 4 years ago

I didn't mean for it to sound as though I thought this was a legitimate reason absolving Google of blame. I cited it as a lame excuse, exactly for the reason you mentioned: this should be a core system thing, not influenceable by third parties.

paganel3• 4 years ago

Dialing the local emergency number (...) sometimes doesn't work,

It very well sounds like a horror movie.

Aachen4• 4 years ago

But "something very scary happened" as a headline is less useful than "X happened" when everyone intuitively understands that situation X is very scary.

Clickbait is where you have to click through for the essential-but-omitted information, written in a way that makes you want to know. This is that. It doesn't mean it's not also accurate.

edent3• 4 years ago

When I used to work for a large mobile network, we would spend ages testing the firmware of new devices. Even giants (at the time) like Nokia would release phones which couldn't dial the emergency services, or put out more than the legal limit of radiation, or were in other ways defective.

We'd test, send a report back, wait a few weeks, get a new firmware, test again, repeat until everything worked. It took months. That was fine when phones weren't expected to be updated by users.

But when more modern phones arrived with flashable firmware, customers couldn't stand the delays associated with testing. They'd see a new firmware had been released and complained that the mobile network operators were delaying progress, dragging our feet, deliberately depriving customers of something cool.

The fact was, operators very often didn't certify the firmware because it contained *dangerous* bugs. I'm sure there was also a cost element - why pay to re-test a phone that you're no longer selling? - but that wasn't the primary driver.

Well, the manufacturers and customers "won". If you buy a phone through your network, it probably has a network-certified firmware blob. If not, you're at the mercy of the manufacturer.

robertlagrant• 4 years ago

How would you have tested 911 dialling? Did you go all the way to a real operator?

edent3• 4 years ago

Yes. From memory we had a specific SIM which was registered with 999. We dialled up, gave a password of the day, and asked them what info they could see about the call. They could see IMSI, IMEI, Cell Location and other things like that.

(A couple of decade ago now - my memory might be inaccurate.)

abruzzi• 4 years ago

I don’t know if cell carriers support it, but we test our PBX with 933. It functions like 911 but doesn’t route to emergency dispatch, instead it reads back out E911 data. I also don’t know if, for cell carriers, it functions enough like 911 that issues on the phone like reported here would be evident.

myself248• 4 years ago

Yes. I used to do this while contracting with Verizon.

When bringing up a new tower, we had a bazillion tests to run, and one of the very last was 911. When that day arrived, my supervisor would call the non-emergency line at the PSAP and check in; sometimes I was in the room for this call. Basically we'd make sure they weren't short-staffed, that they had capacity for the calls, etc. Just a formality.

When testing actually began, I'd simply tell the operator "This is not an emergency, I'm a tech with Verizon making a test call, do you have time to take this call?", and if they were bouncing off their limit, they'd say no, and I was done for the night.

If they said yes, I'd ask them to read back my E911 data. I'd transcribe what they said for later comparison against what was expected, and ask again if they figured they had time to take a few more in the coming minutes. If so, I'd move to the next sector on the tower, lather, rinse, repeat.

It was really quite straightforward, and sometimes I'd get the same operator over and over, they'd recognize my DN and just start rattling off coordinates. At the last call of the night we always made sure to thank them, but briefly, and that was that. My report would go back to the datafill engineer, and that was the last step before unlocking the tower for customer traffic.

moffkalast2• 4 years ago

The way I see it, this just moves the responsibility for safety to the manufacturers instead of the network. It's on the specific company then to provide adequate QA for their firmware before they release updates, or it reflects badly on them. This fiasco for example, tells me to never buy a Google phone since they apparently don't test their devices properly.

I'm not sure why it would be on the network to test devices anyway, it's not like every net card needs to be approved by ICANN or something. There should be standards to adhere to, if those are breached on either end, fines should follow.

edent3• 4 years ago

Most people buy their phone from a network provider / carrier. And when someone goes wrong, customers complain to the network - not the manufacturer.

That's why networks test firmware. Because they face the complaints and chargebacks when the phone breaks.

Mobile networks are, in effect, private networks. Your employer may prohibit certain devices from connecting to their in-office LAN. Or they may insist on specific devices which they know work well with their equipment.

Mobile networks can ban equipment which is stolen. I assume they can also de-register an IMEI if the handset if interfering with the network. Most countries have a regulator who can issue fines for disrupting the airwaves. But they are often unable to investigate non-systemic issues.

ocdtrekkie2• 4 years ago

This is probably like the fourth or fifth time issues calling 911 has come up for Pixel phones too. Google simply isn't capable of producing life-critical software.

hilbert423• 4 years ago

"The way I see it, this just moves the responsibility for safety to the manufacturers instead of the network."

Perhaps so in the current circumstances, but ultimately it is the responsibly of the regulators to ensure the emergency numbers work.

As witnessed here, a number of commentators seem to have forgotten that their smartphones are first and foremost are telephones and not playtoy computers. Unfortunately, the computer aspect now seems to dominate—if this weren't a fact then these unfortunate incidents wouldn't have happened.

dzonga• 4 years ago

it's a simple reason - google relies on automated tests and doesn't do manual testing at all. if they did plenty of bugs on the home scree launcher would've been found. source: I used a pixel 3a for about 3 years, now I have a pixel 6a. all errors I have run into are things only a human can find. low laying fruit.

izacus2• 4 years ago

Well, the fact that big American mobile operators outright blocked or delayed updates for months did not go unnoticed.

Testing is one thing, but in my first hand experience, many carriers used this "testing" as a convenient way to block phone updates without preloaded bloatware preferring their services or apps they were paid to put on the phones.

bestnameever• 4 years ago

many carriers used this "testing" as a convenient way to block phone updates without preloaded bloatware preferring their services or apps they were paid to put on the phones.

How were you involved with the update process to know this?

WrtCdEvrydy2• 4 years ago

This was one of my first jobs at Blackberry.

It was considered the utmost priority for a call to 911 to be clear enough for the other side to hear that you are an employee at a testing facility verifying that the device does work and the other person can hear you and NOT dispatch emergency services....

Cops/EMTs show up, your firmware is junk.

edvards• 4 years ago

How often did they show up, and who paid the fine?

RicoElectrico• 4 years ago

Such things should be under the prerogative of the national telecom regulator body to be checked in the type approval procedure. After all, before EU took the care of this, telecom equipment in European countries had homologation marks of the local FCC equivalents.

mort96• 4 years ago

It's not like months-long delays to get security updates isn't also incredibly dangerous.

sneak• 4 years ago

Life safety dangerous is different than "malware steals your nudes" dangerous.

progval• 4 years ago

customers couldn't stand the delays associated with testing. They'd see a new firmware had been released and complained

Why do customers care about the firmware version?

mitchdoogle2• 4 years ago

Because they want the latest features of the OS on their phone

ilyt• 4 years ago

Wait, shouldn't be something like FCC certifying emission levels not some random mobile network operator ? Or at least company run by them as to not have to repeat test same thing over and over again ?

tlb3• 4 years ago

Emission levels are complicated. There isn't a particular threshold they have to be under. Rather, phones negotiate with the tower to use the minimum power needed to get their signal through, depending on their distance from the tower and other factors. Using lower power means less interference with other phones as well as increased battery life and less RF absorption by the user's head. This negotiation has a lot of parameters that vary between carriers, so carriers legitimately need to test that every model and version of phone works reliably on their network and doesn't just start blasting at full power sometimes, causing other calls to drop.

thih9• 4 years ago

Sounds like you’re unhappy that people didn’t want the network to be responsible for checking against bugs. But would the opposite actually be fine? What about people who buy their phones from the manufacturers?

sandos• 4 years ago

It used to be true that even when having an unlocked device here in Sweden, the operator actually tested and certified the updates, and I know this because updates used to be released at wildly different times between different operators. I assume this has stopped now that I read this, because I do get security updates straight away, and I get the feeling everyone does.

Marsymars3• 4 years ago

I appreciate the value of this, but the incentives are too biased to function properly. I think a good remedy (which would also tackle a number of other conflicts of interests and biased incentives) would be for anti-trust prohibitions on mobile network operators from selling cell phones at all.

Let the network operators continue to certify phones, like hardware manufacturers do with hard drives, memory, etc., dimmer manufacturers do with LEDs, etc.

Make the certification tests, steps and costs transparent to both device manufacturers and the public.

dcow• 4 years ago

And I hope we never go back. That phase of mobile phone history was unbearable and carriers insufferable. If issues are slipping through, it’s manufacturers who should be held to account for their faulty devices. And if faulty firmware/software is a persistent problem, then society should step in and regulate.

90d• 4 years ago

Wouldn't that regulation seem exactly like "going back" to most people?

trasz2• 4 years ago

The problem with operators is not only that they often delayed fixing critical bugs for no good reason; they also liked to add maliceware. I remember a Nokia phone with one key dedicated to trick users into starting it by accident, which of course was billed.

Apple preventing network operators from breaking their software on purpose was a huge step forward.

constantcrying3• 4 years ago

Is there any theory or explanation why this happens? "Third party apps" is totally vague, what third party app could stop you from dialing an emergency number? And even if such apps exist (or even are common) is it not a huge design flaw by itself, which the manufacturer has to remedy?

DoingIsLearning• 4 years ago

Not sure why they don't say it by name but the bug was originally found with MS Teams.

"The issue is the result of an “unintended interaction” between Teams and Android, specifically when the users have the app installed but are not logged in to any account." [0]

[0] https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-microsoft-team...

constantcrying3• 4 years ago

Thanks! Still very weird to be honest.

lultimouomo2• 4 years ago

So users who join Teams calls but refuse to login cannot call 911, and die. Seems in line with the general Teams ethos to be honest.

fallingknife• 4 years ago

Wouldn't this be an easy fix? Just have any emergency number dialed automatically kill all 3rd party apps before sending the call.

mahathu• 4 years ago

“So this is what happens on my brand new $1,000 Google phone when I try to call 911.”

How old is this story? The news report is from 2 days ago, but surely in 2022 the person filming the TikTok video wouldn't call a Pixel 6 a "brand new $1,000 Google phone"?

Caporal• 4 years ago

Old enough to influence people a few days before Black Friday I guess.

jakub_g• 4 years ago

It's not $1000 anymore but you can still buy "brand new" Pixel 6 in retail stores in EU.

happymellon• 4 years ago

We don't call 911.

crooked-v3• 4 years ago

This article, dating back to January, lays it out pretty clearly: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/google-fixes-nightma...

If you're logged out, launching Microsoft Teams 10 times will result in 10 duplicate PhoneAccounts from Teams clogging your phone. Teams shouldn't do this, and Microsoft's update stopped Teams from doing this, but a bunch of duplicate PhoneAccounts also shouldn't be enough to bring Android's phone system to its knees.
Next bug: when picking a PhoneAccount to run the emergency call through, [...] it's possible for this to result in an integer overflow or underflow, and now the phone subsystem is going to crash.
A third bug in this mess is that Microsoft Teams does not even register itself as an emergency call handler.
An update is not arriving for the Pixel 6 yet. Google's newest flagship is going though a bit of an update crisis at the moment. The December 2021 update was pulled due to unrelated "mobile connectivity issues" (phone calls don't work). While Google scrambles to fix everything, the next Pixel 6 update with this 911 fix is due in "late January." Until then, it's normal to be on the November patch. Both of Google's "early January" and "late January" patch timelines seem incredibly slow for a bug that could cause users to literally die.

If the OP article is correct, then apparently this still hasn't actually been fixed yet.

paganel3• 4 years ago

If I get this right, we have a $1+ trillion company not being able to build a basic functionality into their phones? (like "phone calls don't work" and the whole calling 911 issue). And, apparently, that was happening because of a shitty app built by another $1+ trillion company? In terms of innovation the US tech scene is toast with these dinosaurs.

mitchdoogle2• 4 years ago

Bugs happen everywhere, to everyone. The fact that it happened is not a surprise - the lack of an immediate fix is what is concerning

Thaxll• 4 years ago

Why people keep saying 1B+, 1T+ compagny, if you don't want bugs don't use software, the size of the compagny does not matter.

cycomanic2• 4 years ago

And in another thread people talk how "real programmers don't need unit tests", oh the irony.

zackmorris• 4 years ago

Normally failures like this would be addressed through legislation. Perhaps a $10,000 fine per 911 call failure incident. With regulatory capture and half the voting population against regulation, this is unlikely to happen though.

Short of that, boycotts could be organized. Maybe a senior executive at T-Mobile loses their kid in a car accident because the 911 call didn't go through. So they decide to drop Google for 2 years or something.

Soon this sort of B2B boycott could be illegal:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/11/alec-anti-po...

More and more avenues that help common working people stand up to monopoly/duopoly, wealth inequality and other forms of power imbalance are being deemed political.

alexchantavy• 4 years ago

Not sure why you're getting downvoted - I think your comment is fair. As said in the OP article "911 is not a favor to us. It’s required".

sitkack• 4 years ago

Bugs like these can arise from using unsigned values as intermediate results in a computation. Just because the source and dest values are positive integers doesn't mean that results don't go briefly negative.

alistairSH3• 4 years ago

And why the hell does Google/Android allow 3rd party emergency phone service handlers at all?

Something critical like 911 should have one handler. Heck, I’d argue the phone system shouldn’t be allowed to be overloaded by a 3rd party at all. That just sounds like a bowl of buggy spaghetti.

bragr• 4 years ago

And why the hell does Google/Android allow 3rd party emergency phone service handlers at all?

It doesn't, but the interaction of registering a bunch of 3rd party voip services interacts with the emergency call system in interesting ways, as explained in detail in the links Ars Technica article.

jpollock2• 4 years ago

Probably related to [1]:

"The FCC requires that providers of interconnected VoIP telephone services using the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) meet Enhanced 911 (E911) obligations. E911 systems automatically provide emergency service personnel with a 911 caller's call-back number and, in most cases, location information.

To reduce possible risks to public safety, the FCC requires interconnected VoIP providers to:

- Automatically provide 911 service to all customers as a standard, mandatory feature. VoIP providers may not allow customers to "opt-out" of 911 service. "

Can Teams make phone calls?

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/voip-and-911-service

adrianmonk• 4 years ago

If the OP article is correct, then apparently this still hasn't actually been fixed yet.

Or there are two completely different 911-related issues.

c7DJTLrn• 4 years ago

Jesus, Teams really is the worst software in existence. Microsoft keep outdoing themslves.

theCrowing• 4 years ago

Ah yes... the yearly pixel/nexus emergency call bug. I would say it's a total shame for Google that they really have repeating probably life threatening bugs in their phones but they don't seem to care at all.

cube002• 4 years ago

Google's reply to the reporter in the story says it all: We don't have any comment to provide.

They do not care, people need to stop trusting their lives to this company.

CydeWeys• 4 years ago

Oh come on. "No comment" is always what a company says in a situation like this, where saying anything else might hurt them in a future lawsuit. It doesn't mean they don't care, it means they have lawyers with the bare minimum level of competency.

soverance• 4 years ago

They've had this problem for at least a few years, dating all the way back to the OG Pixel 1. I filed an FCC complaint about it four years ago. Not much has changed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProjectFi/comments/9ijq9p/911_probl...

fbdab103• 4 years ago

I was a lifelong Android user, but after I heard about this, I purchased my first iPhone this year. Completely absurd that Google refuses to prioritize safety. While I am mad the bug happened (there should be a dedicated test suite for safety features) - I am furious that there is no stop-the-world escalation to get the problem resolved.

I hate so much about the Apple ecosystem, but screw Google. If it is not a KPI product promotion package, evidently it is not worth the time.

puyoxyz• 4 years ago

Again?! This is, like, the third or fourth time I’ve heard of Pixels not being able to call emergency services.

lsajdn872he• 4 years ago

Pretty sure it's the same old issue and people just haven't updated.

dm319• 4 years ago

I'm all over the place with pocket computing devices and remain confused. I once has an iphone. Beautifully crafted, both inside and out, but so frustratingly locked down that I was desperate to leave it behind. They have progressively opened up the platform, but it always lags behind (I remember I couldn't access the cloud storage from anything other than a mac).

My favourite devices have been more alternative. E90 running symbian, which was fairly 'open' for its time - I could install any software, proper multitasking. The N900 also, full linux system, great phone. But then the apps I find useful, are often not available for that platform.

At the moment I'm on Pixel, which has been a good balance between being well supported, while still fairly open. I can sideload apps, run a linux distro in the form of termux. As a bonus the camera is great. I have to remind myself that while it might not quite compare to iphones in terms of refinement and hardware, I do at least have more freedom on the platform, and it's easy to take that for granted until you lose it.

vbezhenar2• 4 years ago

I’m in a similar position. I used iPhone for years but after they started to remove important apps from AppStore I decided to move to pixel. UX is terrible and unpolished. Hardware is just bad. But I can sideload and that’s more important.

nvr2193• 4 years ago

What app did they remove that you used?

2OEH8eoCRo02• 4 years ago

Same. In the end I choose to die on the freedom hill, adjacent to the privacy hill. I wish there were more options.

_def• 4 years ago

Privacy? https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-privacy-dsid-analytics-pers...

canbus• 4 years ago

This kind of thing makes me want to use a 'dumbphone' as my daily driver..

djhworld• 4 years ago

Are there reports of similar problems outside of the US, e.g. dialling 999 in the UK from a pixel phone?

Havoc• 4 years ago

FYI memorizing 112 is probably a better idea. It's baked into GSM spec and gets redirected to the right country end-point (like 999 for UK) in most of the world.

Same difference while in UK, but good habit for travelling.

Archipelagia2• 4 years ago

For my experience, when possible it's better to use the more direct number – that extra layer of redirection takes only a minute or two, but in an emergency that can be a lot.

hopfog• 4 years ago

I've seen many reports of this on Pixel phones but I experienced something very similar on another Android phone (it was either Moto G5 or OnePlus One): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29494820

Jemm• 4 years ago

Unusable website

exabrial• 4 years ago

On my pixel 4 it failed to call 911 when i needed it once. The phone literally crashed and hung up.

But here you know what worked really well? Google tracking me all over the Internet… that never once failed!

wholinator2• 4 years ago

Well, I'm being pedantic but how do you know Google tracking never once failed? It could fail 50 times a day in strange circumstances but work just often enough to keep the approximate trail without you being aware. In fact, I'm nearly certain that just due to the ubiquity of Googles tracking, it's vastly more likely to break than the phone services. Now, each of these have very different meanings and severity and all concern is certainly warranted but if you do, I would be interested in how you're tracking google's tracking

ars• 4 years ago

Google tracking fails me all the time. I check my timeline on Google maps, and it's wrong more often than it's right.

GrabbinD33ze69• 4 years ago

Maybe this is a 'straw man', but this is what I refer to when I say I prefer iPhones for their reliability and stability, or at least what I perceive to be more reliable than most android phones. The closest issue I can recall on iPhone was that issue where saying some nonsense to siri caused an erroneous dialing of 911.

I get it, this is sorta a one off thing, but it irks me when super basic functionality of the phone is unstable, such as making a literal phone call.

nsteel• 4 years ago

As an end user today with a Pixel 6, what am I supposed to do if I can't rely on them to get this right? I NEED 999 to work. If not for me, then the people around me. Am I supposed to go and ring 999 to test it after every major update until Google gives an actual statement on the condition of their shitty product that has failed the most important use-case? That doesn't scale and if nothing else, Google should understand a scaling problem...

Marsymars3• 4 years ago

As an end user today with a Pixel 6, what am I supposed to do if I can't rely on them to get this right?

Buy a Pixel Watch! I’m sure emergency dialling won’t be broken on both the watch and phone at the same time!

But in seriousness, I personally just accept that cell phones aren’t a bulletproof way of accessing emergency services. At any point in time, my phone could be out of service, out of battery, dropped and broken, unconnected due to a network outage, etc. An emergency services bug is a qualitative difference, not a quantitative one. I qualitatively increase my odds of being able to access emergency services by running redundant systems - I have a VoIP landline, my partner has a cell phone with a different OS/mobile network than me, I carry a PLB if I’m in the wild. (I plan on getting an LTE-capable watch at some point - the Pixel Watch is quite unappealing for the price though.) (Will probably switch from PLB to sat messenger when the battery on this expires, which will double as an emergency service contact backup.)

jerlam• 4 years ago

Do you have any local emergency non-999 numbers? I have saved the numbers for the local emergency dispatch numbers for the cities around me, along with the non-emergency ones. This is also where directing specific people around you to call 999 (or calling on another person's phone) is a backup plan.

hilbert423• 4 years ago

Frankly, that this situation happened at all is outrageous and certifying bodies should take steps to ensure it's no longer possible for it to happen.

The solution is to mandate that emergency numbers be hardwired into phones and thus their operation could not be overwritten by any software whether it be the phone's operating system or any user app.

Moreover, it would make sense for all phones, irrespective of country of origin, to include emergency numbers from all countries, i.e: 911, 112, 000 and any others I'm not aware of. Moreover, all emergency numbers should work—that is no matter what emergency number is dialed it still should connect to the local emergency number.

This is important because tourists/travelers in a different country may be unaware of the emergency number for the country they are visiting. Whilst roaming, the phone would recognize its location by actual location and the carrier its connected to and it would dial the correct number even when the user dials his/her home emergency number.

This is not just a nice hypothetical, there have been multiple instances of US citizens visiting Australia where I am and dialing 911 in an emergency and failing to connect with the local one. Here, as in Europe, the mobile number is 112 and the landline one 000.

Why this wasn't a part of the original ITU 'G' roaming specs is anyone's guess but it's an obvious and very dumb omission.

Dylan168076• 4 years ago

This has nothing to do with the problem of different numbers.

NelsonMinar• 4 years ago

Most of the discussion here is related to 911-specific bugs in Pixel. But there's also generic cellular communications bugs, and based on what I see on Reddit it's widely experienced but not well understood. The symptom I see is nothing cellular works sometimes until I put the phone in airplane mode and back again. Networking software bug? Problem with the cellular tower? I have no idea. But it seems very common on Pixel 6. I probably won't buy another Google made phone because of it.

Eleison232• 4 years ago

In these United States, there are now two emergency numbers which can be dialed: 911 and 988, for mental health crises.

The last time I removed the SIM from my Android phone, I tested 988; unsurprisingly I was not able to contact the service because the phone denied access.

If your phone doesn't recognize 988 as a bona fide, legitimate emergency number, it's time to request a firmware update. 988 has been years in the making, and firmware developers should have made it a priority to put it on the whitelist.

Eleison232• 4 years ago

I must qualify this by pointing out that I have mixed feelings about the 988 line.

It streamlines the hospital pipeline for committing people who are DTS/DTO (5150) status, and let me tell you, that is an easy status to earn or gain.

The hospitals profit immensely from admitting mental patients in a way that jails and police don't profit from locking up people who act crazy.

Every time there is a mass shooting in these United States, the Legislature swoops in and throws more cash-money at mental health programs. Therefore more mass shootings will tangibly "improve" your mental health care (if improvement is gained from larger budgets) and the more insurance money available, the more crazies they can lock up and the longer they can hold you in the hospital "just to make sure" you're responding well to treatment and that you'll be a permanent customer after your release.

So call 988 at your own peril, because the mental health system is a roach motel for many of us. Welcome to the Hotel California.

komali23• 4 years ago

I used to be REALLY into modding / jailbreaking / rooting / installing custom ROMs on android phones, until I witnessed a car accident, tried to call 911 on my iirc galaxy s3, only for it to crash. Luckily my friend was able to call, but I tried again a couple times later and sure enough, dialing 911 on whatever ROM I had simply crashed the phone.

As much as I miss having root on my phone, I'm never taking the risk again. Being able to use payment features is a nice extra plus I guess.

partiallypro• 4 years ago

As a 6 Pro user, even if you could get ahold of 911 your signal may just drop out entirely in the middle of your call. I've never had a phone that drops signal so often. It's insane. I used the Black Friday sales to get a new phone to replace this one for that reason specifically.

nunez• 4 years ago

i'm REALLY surprised that this is still a problem, especially after the last 911 fiasco (the one where Teams was preventing users from dialing 911 due to call routing)

it feels like android in general has had issues with 911/112. i remember cyanogenmod ROMs (when that was a thing) having issues as well.

p1mrx• 4 years ago

There ought to be a test number that behaves like 911 except for the "emergency" part at the end.

This entire class of problems wouldn't exist if anyone could run an integration test.

layer8• 4 years ago

I’m sure we’d then get bugs where the test number is called instead of the real 911.

murpydee• 4 years ago

I actually had another emergency-call-related bug a few days ago on my Pixel 5 after accidentally triggering the SOS call feature.

My device got stuck in a reboot loop -- it would reach the colored google "G" logo in the startup process, then reboot again. Every handful of cycles, it would reach the lock screen, attempt to start an emergency call, then reboot again.

I had to get my device to the debug fastboot screen just to kill the loop

Animats• 4 years ago

The regulation problem is that the "Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act of 1999", which requires carriers to support 911, predates smartphones with non-carrier software. There's Kari's Law, [1] which requires multi-line phone systems to support direct 911 (not 9-911, or diverting 911 calls to in house guards). That applied to the Microsoft Teams problem, where Microsoft Teams was capturing 911 calls but not connecting them if the user was not logged into Teams.

If the FCC went after Google on this, they could probably win claiming clear legislative intent to cover all the cases, and that a third party who insinuates themselves into the call chain has the same liability as the carrier. File a formal complaint with the FCC, and copy your elected representatives.

[1] https://www.911.gov/issues/legislation-and-policy/kari-s-law...

elwell• 4 years ago

I had the opposite problem with an iPhone last week: it called 911 all by itself. I was in a different room so I didn't hear any warnings. Instead, I heard the "It's the police! Open up!" accompanied by banging on the door around midnight.

Since I had recently washed the phone (it's supposed to be water-resistant), my theory is that some water got into it and was completing the contact for the side button. There's an iPhone 'feature' that does an emergency SOS if you hold down the side button for about 10 seconds. I've since turned that feature off. Unfortunately the "side button being constantly held down" problem is persisting for me, sending the phone into recovery mode whenever it turns on; I may need to scrap the phone.

n8cpdx• 4 years ago

Google Pixel phones pose an unacceptable safety risk to vulnerable Americans. This product should be recalled and future Google phone products should be refused certification until they document and enact a plan to do QA. And no, “engineers write their own unit tests” does not count as QA for safety-critical software.

I luckily don’t own one, but if I did I’d be reporting it to every regulator I could find. https://www.saferproducts.gov/

charonn0• 4 years ago

I contacted Glynn County emergency services about Macleod’s 911 issue. The county said it “did not find any record of these calls registering in our system during the time in question” despite Macleod’s phone log showing she called 911.

I was under the impression that (successful) 911 calls aren't recorded in the call log.

diebeforei485• 4 years ago

Why are apps allowed to take over the main dialer?

hedora• 4 years ago

Since this has apparently been happening for multiple years, and is a safety issue, why don't the authorities order a product recall? 100% refund for every pixel phone seems reasonable, and Google has that sort of cash laying around anyway.

silexia• 4 years ago

I owned a Pixel 1, a Pixel 2... and now a Pixel 6. Pixel 6 is by far the worst. It is extremely low quality and the screen has broken twice in a year just sitting in my pocket. It runs slowly and has frequent bugs. Garbage phone.

Issue dialing 911 on Google Pixel 6 cell phones

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