I found out an interesting fact after the USA deployed the national "mental health hotline" number. My Android 11 phone refuses to recognize it as a valid emergency number. It has an interface where, if it's locked or SIM missing, it prompts you to dial an emergency number. And you can enter any number you want, but the only number that works is "911". (Perhaps 999 works too, or only in Europe/UK?) But if you dial the "mental health" number, it refuses. I was hoping that an update would address this, but not yet. You'd think this would be something that could be anticipated and deployed ahead of the actual opening of the hotline.
I wonder if that had to do with the underlying business arrangements with the telcos.
They are probably set up to special-case 911 alone for phones with no service/SIM, and getting them to accept a second number is an entire new set of legal and contract arguments.
If you have a SIM in the phone than the only thing what prevents you from dialing anything is the cellular operator itself.
If you don't have a SIM than it's more complicated because the phone needs to register somehow in the network and, probably, indicate what it's trying to call an emergency number (so the network would allow both the registration and the call to occur).
I had an Android phone that after a few years started giving me problems with its power button, single presses would register as 2 presses (and launch the camera), I think some presses wouldn't register at all.
One time, I mashed the power button trying to see if it would fix the problem, and I ended up reaching the emergency number. Followed procedure and told them it was my butt that dialed them...
I still love and much prefer physical buttons, but they can and do fail with age and use when they're made cheaply. I've got NES controllers that took decades of button mashing and abuse yet still function, but I've thrown out cell phones, mice/keyboards, and modern controllers that didn't last 2 or 3 years.
Many years ago my dad got his first mobile phone, and as he was playing around with it he accidentally dialled emergency services. I think it was simultaneously pressing two buttons. He probably wasn't the first, or the last.
It's kind of amazing we're still dealing with these problems 25 years later.
I wonder how many people actually use this feature for its intended purpose, and how many of those would not be able to just dial the emergency number. Just dialling "999" (or "112", "911" – many of these work in most countries) seems a lot easier than trying to think of what the shortcut you never use is.
