[deviation]

Not to hand wave-- but this feels industry standard IMO. I have a dozen PRs sitting unacknowledged and stale across a handful of FAANG (and other) repos, including Apple's.

I start my first day @ Apple in a few weeks, so I ACK that my opinion might be a little biased here.

[dmd]

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]

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]

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]

now this is agile QA

[ChrisMarshallNY]

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]

> 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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[PaulHoule]

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.

[bryanrasmussen]

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]

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]

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

[dmd]

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

[jiveturkey]

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]

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]

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.

[atkailash]

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

[mmmlinux]

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

[inopinatus]

Industry baseline is slightly worse again e.g. attempt to report a bug in a Microsoft product that a major government customer is experiencing when they use it with our stuff, but Microsoft won't accept the bug report because we don't ourselves have an enterprise support contract with them, and the customer's own relationship with MS is nigh-impossible to navigate because of public sector nonsense.

[devmor]

If you ever get the chance, maybe you can be the one that improves that process some day.

Even if it's standard among tech giants, you could be the one that makes a new standard! Good luck in your new role, btw.

[ryandrake]

Unless one's title is going to be "VP" or "SVP", the chance that someone joins BigTech and gets to "improve the process" is usually miniscule. You're being hired as cog #21 on team #54 and there is a large backlog of JIRA (well, in this case, Radar) tickets to grind through. There will be people who tell you what the processes are, and to not deviate from them. And you shouldn't get mad at those people, either--they're just the messengers, and were told what the processes are by people above them on the totem pole and so on.

[dlcarrier]

I've only submitted two security reports, both for very blatant bugs, and they've booth been closed as "works as intended".

I don't think my bank had intended to make passwords optional, and the third-party administrator of their bug bounty program agreed, when creating the report, but once it made it to the bank, it was up to them to decide if it was or was not a bug.

[tpurves]

Did you take a job at Apple just so you can accept one or more of those PR's that's been bugging you? :)

Wasn't there an xkcd about that scenario...

[ninju]

Just gotta be careful...

https://xkcd.com/1739/