Comment by dmd - Hacker Neue

dmd Sep 17, 2025 parent

Maybe you can help bump FB13400242, a bug that is _literally_ going to kill people. (The bug is that to make an emergency call, even from lock screen, you're supposed to be able to squeeze buttons on either side of the phone. But it only works with the volume buttons on the left - the Action button didn't get supported, when that button was added. So now the rule for teaching a small child isn't just "squeeze both sides" it's "oh but not that one!")

(Yes, this came close to killing someone close to me. Fortunately someone else happened to come along to help.)

RankingMember Sep 17, 2025

Consider hitting up some Apple "watcher" people (e.g. 9to5mac) to see if they can give you a boost on their social media. It's pretty obnoxious that it's come to needing to make a stink like that to get eyeballs on something, but here we are.

sgerenser Sep 17, 2025

This definitely works. When I was at Apple I remember a number of issues in their weekly “bug review board” were classified as being high priority because they were going viral on Twitter.

sitzkrieg Sep 18, 2025

now this is agile QA

ChrisMarshallNY Sep 18, 2025

Worked for the company I was at.

There were certain photographers and publications, that, if they got upset, all hands were on deck, for even the most innocuous bugs.

morpheuskafka Sep 17, 2025

> you're supposed to be able to squeeze buttons on either side of the phone. But it only works with the volume buttons on the left

I don't recall there ever being any official language about "squeezing both sides of the phone" to make emergency calls. Doesn't the feature description in Settings explicitly reference which buttons to press?

SoftTalker Sep 17, 2025

I'm decades away from being a small child and I can't remember these gestures. The only time I get screenshots or activate emergency mode on my phone is accidentally. Of course I also don't expect my phone to be able to help me much in an emergency.

darkwater Sep 17, 2025

Well, not an Apple fan personally but on this they are just top of class. Even if this story involves an Apple Watch and not an iPhone, my father-in-law some time ago fainted (due to an underlying heart issue we late uncovered), knocked his head on the toilet when he got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. He lost consciousness for a brief moment and when he regained it, there was already someone from the emergency line speaking through the Apple Watch and he got the ambulance at home faster that without wearing the Apple Watch, and surely helped in saving his life.

Btw I wonder if Apple sends some spoken message to the emergency services or some metadata or just connects the phones and that's it.

Edit: oh and I forgot: my wife got a loud message (that bypassed DND) telling her that her father maybe felt, because she is one of his emergency contacts.

SoftTalker Sep 17, 2025

My phone is off at night and I don't have a watch. I try not to let these huge companies FUD me into thinking that I appreciably change my odds of surviving an accident by buying their technology, but I get that others see it differently.

KerrAvon Sep 17, 2025

Maybe you want to rethink that? You're literally responding to a testimonial that it likely saved someone's life. Seconds do matter in some medical emergencies.

Also, you may not be aware of Car Crash Detection https://support.apple.com/en-us/104959

bigiain Sep 18, 2025

Of course, the seconds that matter might be someone else's medical emergency, which your iPhone or Apple Watch is slowing down with false positives.

From https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/03/iphone-crash-detection-critic...

“My whole day is managing crash notifications,” said Trina Dummer, interim director of Summit County’s emergency services, which received 185 such calls in the week from Jan. 13 to Jan. 22. (In winters past, the typical call volume on a busy day was roughly half that.) Ms. Dummer said that the onslaught was threatening to desensitize dispatchers and divert limited resources from true emergencies.

darkwater Sep 18, 2025

Yep, this is the other side of the coin for sure. There should probably be some basic training around these features; there will still be many (careless) people that just completely ignore the "are you OK?" question the watch/phone is asking them but maybe the situation would improve.

PaulHoule Sep 17, 2025

To be fair this kind of thing is emotionally manipulative.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has done a lot as a private organization to raise standards for automotive safety but the statistics they publish that show that larger vehicles are safer than larger vehicles are frequently wrongly interpreted -- in many of the cases where the large vehicle does better it's not that you die in the smaller vehicle but instead get a broken bone. Once something is seen as "life or death" some people will think they have no choice but to spend another $50,000, spew another 20 tons of carbon pollution, etc.

3 More Comments →

bryanrasmussen Sep 17, 2025

A bug that has been reported that is down prioritized that then leads to killing people would be a pretty bad case for Apple when it came to court.

vondur Sep 17, 2025

Here's the official Apple Information on how to do this:

In case of emergency, use your iPhone to quickly and easily call for help and alert your emergency contacts (provided that cellular service is available). After an emergency call ends, your iPhone alerts your emergency contacts with a text message, unless you choose to cancel. Your iPhone sends your current location (if available) and—for a period of time after you enter SOS mode—your emergency contacts receive updates when your location changes.

Note: If you have iPhone 14 or later (any model), you may be able to contact emergency services through satellite if cell service isn’t available. See Use Emergency SOS via satellite on your iPhone.

Simultaneously press and hold the side button and either volume button until the sliders appear and the countdown on Emergency SOS ends, then release the buttons.

Or you can enable iPhone to start Emergency SOS when you quickly press the side button five times. Go to Settings > Emergency SOS, then turn on Call with 5 Presses.

pants2 Sep 17, 2025

I think a faster / easier approach is to just press the biggest button repeatedly until it makes an emergency call for you.

dmd OP Sep 17, 2025

A five year old is going to find "just squeeze" easier than doing that.

Bud Sep 17, 2025 (dead)

jiveturkey Sep 17, 2025

five year olds shouldn't have a phone, and should be supervised. even if they have a phone, they are unlikely to handle it with the care it requires.

masspro Sep 17, 2025

Thread is talking about kids knowing how to request emergency services with a nearby phone in case something happens to their parent(s). Nothing to do with giving kids their own phones.

jiveturkey Sep 17, 2025

A nearby phone implies a nearby phone user that would presumably understand how to place an emergency call, especially if they are being asked by a frantic five year old.

catgirlinspace Sep 17, 2025

if it’s only the kid and the nearby phone user, and the nearby phone user is having an emergency (that’s also preventing them from being able to call themselves) then the kid is able to do it.

atkailash Sep 19, 2025

Maybe when something is done to prevent school shootings this can be a discussion

KingLancelot Sep 18, 2025 (dead)

mmmlinux Sep 17, 2025

well you're already starting off assuming that the kid is holding an iPhone. so its already an "oh but not that one" situation.

dmd OP Sep 17, 2025 (dead)

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