In a somewhat similar vein, I find that when I use my Apple Watch to track a hike, it will frequently auto pause or ask me if I've finished when I'm climbing slowly up a steep ascent. It annoys the heck out of me because that's often when I'm working hardest. My watch is also tracking my heart rate - and I think it's pretty safe to assume that if my HR is holding steady at 150 BPM then I have not stopped for a break.
Or at least give me the option to turn off Auto Pause/Auto End just for hiking workouts - instead I have to turn off the feature for all workouts. But I suppose that level of customization would be very un-Apple.
The world of appliances is littered with these "smart" features that purport to make life more convenient, but are implemented so crudely that they end up causing more trouble than they solve.
The Apple Watch is definitely fashion accessory first and fitness device second.
I can't use it running in the colder seasons - a sweaty sleeve triggers the lap count (tap the screen - no ability to reassign to a button). It's one of the most annoying and fixable (if they cared) issues on an Apple device I've encountered. Not even the ultra-premium, ulta-outdoorsy Ultra version lets you map "lap count" to the extra button!!!
It's just both (or more for the casual jogger than serious ultra runner for example). If you need a proper, dedicated sports device get a coros, garmin or suunto. Apple Watch is more leaning towards day to day, while these things are for sports and just for sports. But suck at day to day stuff if you want the fancy apple watch things. Pick your poison.
The battery life negative on the Apple Watch is the big thing. I have an Ultra that is a bit better but I don't wear it say-to-day because the charging routine is a bit of a pain.
Yea this sucks the moment you are shopping for anyone besides yourself. You can split up the items in the grocery store and be done way faster. Even alone, the person at home can add some last minute items.
Just use something self hosted like Mealie. I'll be shopping for what I want to make and then see something is on sale and can easily look up a recipe to add to the list as well.
i find it very convenient being able to, at any point in the day whether my hands are messy or my phone or a piece of paper are far from me, simply raise my wrist and say "add greek yogurt to my grocery list"
There are tons of secondary apps that provide all of those things. Fundamentally the Garmin records less baseline parameters than the Apple Watch does for instance it does not do blood oxygen level monitoring, so whatever stats it’s providing are just software algorithms.
To my knowledge, Apple Health is the only health/fitness data storage with end to end encrypted data, which is one of my main reasons to stay out of other fitness eco systems even if their hardware is way better.
I feel like there has to be a middle ground between giving everything to an untrusted cloud and manually downloading raw data and building home grown tools to try and process and make sense of it. As a user, I don't want either of those extremes.
There is https://gadgetbridge.org, which seems like a cool project but I never used it since it is Android only and don't know how good the support actually is.
Does your garmin watch not charge? If you call them and are nice they'll probably give you a heavily discounted replacement. Mine died on me randomly and they gave me a new 900 series forerunner for $125
It charges if and only when it wants to. And I've been a Garmin enthusiast for a while and been through a few devices already though I am getting sick of the charging unreliability.
Like if I am really careful I can plug my watch into the computer and it might start charging in a few minutes. Or like last night I made two tries and neither of them worked. I want to be able to plug it in to charge and completely take it for granted that I will come back later and it will be charged. I might wind up attempting to charge the watch for four whole hours in a day as it is now.
Personally I am very traumatized by USB connections that don't work and when I hear the sound of a USB device dropping out on my Windows computer I feel like a veteran who thinks a misfiring car is a gunshot. I want a charging connector which is 100% reliable and I want Garmin to pay me $10,000 if I ever hear that sound because of their poorly designed connector.
So I want a replacement watch that charges reliably, I don't want a cheap newer watch that has the same improperly designed connector. Next week I am going to be off grid at an event where I'm expected to have a reliable watch and hoping I can charge it successfully off a power bank at least once.
Agreed. I’m on my 4th Garmin and the charging cable last about a year or two at most. That said, for me it has always just been the cable and the watch is self last forever. All 4 of my old Garmin’s still work if I get them out of a drawer and charge them up. Now I just small USBC -> Garmin adapter's that normally get lost before they wear out.
I would love a standards based wireless option here.
I want it off by default even for calm low HR outdoor walks. Nothing wrong with stopping a few minutes to admire nature during your outdoor walks! This feature was probably designed by the same person who thought it was a great idea not to let us switch off the screenshot sound.
Wild guess is that the screenshot sound is to prevent capturing video frames silently, which would be a workaround of the camera click noise that's meant to prevent covert photos of those unaware that their picture is being taken.
If you are serious about health tracking, get a device that specializes in that and knows what they are doing -- get a polar. They publish papers on the science behind their technology. Many professional athletes do heart tracking with polar devices. Even Garmin isn't as good being it is a GPS company first. If you want mediocre, by all means get an apple device. Their goal is to sell you stuff and keep you hooked in the ecosystem with a veil of convenience.
Fwiw, polar let's you tune the parameters of when to start and stop recording.
I got an Apple Watch just before the pandemic. In the winter I love to XC Ski, but it wasn't in there as an activity -- I guess not much snow in Cupertino.
After a year or two of daily charging I went back to my trusty Garmin 935 that lasts ~2 weeks on a charge (used to be more like a month, but you know what I can install a replacement battery!) -- the Garmin does have an XC Ski activity.
I just checked and it looks like Cross Country Skiing is an option now.
But yeah I think Garmin and other smart watches are definitely preferred by serious athletes (and people who don't like charging their watch daily). Whereas I mostly just use my Apple Watch as a way to get notifications and as a glorified step tracker.
Strange. I've never experienced anything like this. I can forget it's on and stop moving entirely for an hour and the apple watch doesn't turn my walk off!
I have a Pixel 7a on the latest version (Android 17, July 2026 build), and I'm able to turn this off. If you want to find it the long way, then tap through the following screens:
For iPhone users, you can set up a Shortcut that achieves similar results because many snatchers will instinctively try to turn off cellular:
+ When airplane mode is enabled
+ Lock the screen and require password
Locking the phone is the most important thing. Losing the physical device is a bummer but it can be replaced and restored. Allowing access to any apps or message history is the worst case scenario.
I found this doozy from someone trying to test out the feature:
> After looking over Google’s advice, my key takeaway was that thieves are in much better shape than me, and run both longer and faster than this nerdy writer has in more than two decades.
Personally, the main situation I'm concerned about is on a bus or train, where someone grabs your phone right and exits right before the door closes. But I already avoid spending a lot of time on the street with my head buried in my phone.
I always agree with your statement when people discuss it from a purely theoretical philosophical/moral standpoint.
But when it actually happens to you, as I have been violently mugged several times. Oh, would I push that button - pull that trigger and I'd rewind time so I can do it a few times over. Cathartic.
These little fuckers hide out in alleyways late at night and they've made a career of it. They do it so often they embellish their muggings with other bits like choking and mock stabbing or slamming people's heads against pavements. So fuck 'em.
No, I'm saying it's only human to retroactively want to do extreme fantastical violence against people who have physically harmed you when you live in a society that a: does not care that you were hurt because you're a man and b: pressures men into fending for themselves, sorting out their own problems and "manning up".
I'm not the type, myself. But damn, no wonder downtrodden men end up snapping - because they most often have nobody to turn to and are forced to exist within a bubble that analyses their weakness and victimhood as much as women are for beauty standards, etc.
Maybe, but these thieves might do more damage than just needing to replace the phone. Some of them will attempt to use the information on it for extortion or blackmail (which is why such a feature exists in the first place).
Don’t forget the lifelong trauma you get from a robbery. I know people who stopped using public transport after getting their bag violently snatched from them.
Violence begets violence. A theft of a thousand plus dollar item is grand theft in the US. Ending a continual threat to society should be lauded not threatened.
How many thefts, by a single individual, is tolerable before society is allowed to remove the threat with permanence? Ten? A hundred? A thousand?
Some would answer one, single instance is enough for a weapons discharge. I would ask. How many times is allowable?
The criminal has no care for society, or its lives, so why should society care about that life?
What about the hundreds of journeys you'll inevitably disrupt? Should your fellow passengers perhaps be free to use lethal force against you in return?
I don’t mind being late for work if that means someone got their phone back and justice was served. I’m fairly certain my boss would give me a high five.
Stolen phone -> access to finances (through password reset emails/SMS or just apps on the phone) -> no ability to pay for medicine/healthcare -> death.
Stolen phone -> post offensive things to users Twitter account -> fired from job -> lose healthcare -> death.
Stolen phone -> send violent threat against police posing as phone owner -> SWAT team shoots on sight -> death.
This feels debatable to me. I wouldn't at all be upset if someone pulled the emergency stop cord in that case. Getting hundreds of dollars robbed from you on the <whatever> is a big deal.
I've been running for 3 years with a pixel 7a, even doing sprints once a week.
It triggered once.
But I keep the phone in a running belt, not in my hands.
Now that I think about, it the time it triggered I was pacing my GF and holding the phone in my hand. So it might be a much more common occurrence if you run with your phone in your hands.
Anyway, since I'm often in places where this kind of theft is common. I love the feature and I'd rather it triggers every now and then wrongly than not.
I was running on a treadmill a few weeks back, and was knackered so stopped abruptly by jumping into a straddle position with my legs on the rails either side of the actual band on the treadmill. My smartwatch interpreted this as a fall and sent a red alert to my daughter.
In Sweden where I live you need to use the digital national ID whenever you make a credit card transaction via some app, for example when buying a bus ticket, so you need to have it with you at all times. But with the ID you can also take a quick loan and transfer all the money to a foreign bank basically ruining your life as the bank take no responsibility if the ID is used during the transaction.
The issue is that someone can look over your shoulder and memorize your code, if you use a pin in public.
Some people will use the same pin for screen lock and BankID, and if someone gets their code and their phone they can cause a huge amount of trouble in a very short time.
Technically yes, but it seems like people's intuition for safe behaviour is worse across the board with modern technology, than it is with old technology.
Maybe it will improve by itself over time, but maybe not? There are a lot of things that humans generally suck at, and successful, human-friendly design must take that into account and work around it systematically.
Maybe phones/it/banking/payments/identity/authorization needs to be radically changed, in order to serve society well.
Passwords are "protected content" that may be hidden in a web form, but usernames are not. Your username won't be routinely hidden by any ordinary password manager.
You may have difficulty when the need arises to share a long string of random digits with another human, or in writing. This may not ordinarily be a thing if more LLMs and chatbots are doing customer service, but if it's a government service, one day we find ourselves at a field office speaking with a civil servant at a window that is armored with Plexiglas, and nobody has a pen to write with, or scratch paper.
One of my colleagues said he was so clever that all his "security question" answers were random hex strings. So I imitated him, and it was very easy with the KeePassXC password generator parameters to generate a hex string of 32 characters, and so "my first grade teacher" was 0xf7a83392b12b1029ac3be7e029acbe7e; my "favorite color" was 0xa83392ac3be7e029acbe7f7a83392b17, etc.
This turned comical because security questions are particularly designed to be asked and answered in human conversations. Over the phone, the pharmacy CSR was not amused, and I lost a few accounts thanks to this ultra-paranoiac attitude and activity.
My username doesn't fit in the web form. Instead of seeing "Symbiote" (which can be read and remembered immediately) someone sees "Sym-065c7d6c-e0b3-4d——" with half of the random characters not visible.
People in Denmark are expected to use this system to authenticate money transfers and to digitally sign documents (e.g. buy a house!).
My investment account allows up to 5,000,000DKK (€670,000) to be transferred with this digital signature.
The app is owned by a consortium of Swedish banks, so you are using a bank app to approve the credit card / bank transaction.
At least in my experience, I only needed to authenticate with the app the first time I bought a train ticket, but I don't buy bus/train tickets in Sweden very often.
(But this authentication is annoying for trivial online purchases like this, so given the choice I prefer to use a physical card.)
BankID (which is the one I assume he's talking about, and not Freja eID) is owned by several banks, but you aren't forced to use it. You can use a "bankdosa" (a separate physical device for auth)
Considering that the comments in the original article shows he is using a Pixel 7, the solution is obvious: give Google and its spyware the cold shoulder and install GrapheneOS.
I refuse to go running with a phone - too heavy, and too distracting, running outside is one of the few places I _escape_ the phone for a bit. So I made sure to get a fitness tracker with onboard GPS. It syncs to the phone later, when I return, which then uploads workout data to the vendor's cloud.
I look at the results on my PC with a web browser, phone is a passive middleman and is never touched directly for fitness tracking.
Maybe he said it as in you feel you have it with you when you run. I've tried many things (arm bands, phone belts), but I still can't find a good place for it. There's always something too tight, too loose etc.
You may have tried this, but I run with my phone in an elasticated belt that's just tight enough to keep the phone stable without being uncomfortable. I really don't want to fork out for another device just for running. (I also find a watch on my wrist annoying when I don't wear one normally).
Not the OP but I used to do that - problem is phones are becoming so damn large even the elasticated belt doesnt work that great anymore. Too much bounce.
I found a "belt" thats much wider and doesnt have a clip (has to be sized just right) that does work better. But a bit of a pain to wear sometimes.
For years I just literally ran with the phone in my hand (got used to switching hands and positions for comfort) so I could still do music and tracking. Not that bad when you get used to it. Eventually got a Garmin watch (cheapest with maps and music) which works great.
9/10 runs I leave my phone at home, but when I do bring it for some reason, I'm very happy with my "Flipbelt(tm)". It carries a 250g phone with no slipping, sliding or bounce.
My Flipbelt has lost some tightness after three years and many laundry cycles, but it still manages a Pixel 10a with no problems.
The belt rests over the hip and I usually have the phone flat on my backside. I don't really notice it after a few steps.
question is _why_ are you bringing it on your run?
the OP says they want their run to be time away from the phone. Not just because it is too difficult to carry physically.
Ok, you don't want to fork out for another device just for running, but why do you need a device at all? And what if it is those "needs" that the OP is trying to get away from.
To have a small window of time when you are free from all the damn devices.
Do please link to leggings with pockets, I'll pass the info to some ladies I know...
For men, part of my "hiking pants" have zipped pockets that are big enough and placed well enough that the phone doesn't bother you when running or climbing or whatever. (Don't get me started on women's hiking pants, the missus buys hers from the men's section.)
It's also an amazing option on the Google app on the iPad.
Yeah sure, let me just shake my freaking massive tablet when I have feedback. What next, shake your 16" MacBook every time you find a bug? You'll have a better chance of quashing a physical bug than a digital bug at that point.
I'm sitting at my desk browsing my phone and it gets locked with the theft protection alert. This only started happening in recent weeks. It's super annoying :/
Is "snatching a phone and running off" a common enough problem in some regions that this is worth having? Or is this a feature chasing after fears of the bogeyman, leading to concrete inconveniences like this?
Thanks! Given this was CBC, my jaw hit the floor when I saw London. I live 20 mins from London, Ontario and 70k thefts in a year would be _insane_. Then I realized it was about London, U.K. and my jaw only hit the table. 70k is still insane, though.
Is it really insane? That is less than 200 per day, in a city of 15 million people.. a single gang of 20 thieves could likely manage that! The real question is, how does this compare to other cities of this size and demographics?
I'd say it's a lot higher than this. This is just the reported numbers.
I live in London and I'm fairly careless. Yesterday when I hopped onto a bus a driver told me I was crazy for holding my phone out infront of me and that it would be snatched if I kept that up.
I could list 10 people I know that have had their phone stolen at some point in the last few years. I've also seen it happen several times. It's very common.
200 SNATCHED phones a day is insane number, I seriously doubt in 10 times smaller European cities you will find 20 people per day with someone snatching their phone
I would expect a city that's mostly retirement communities to have less snatch-and-run thefts than a city where tourists make up a large part of the population at any given time.
Interestingly, Tokyo has a much larger population than London with a very low crime rate. I can’t find specific numbers on stolen phones (only lost phone statistics are published) but robberies/muggings are 0.04 per 1,000 yearly versus London’s 2.83 per 1,000. Seoul has a similar rate to Tokyo, 0.4 to 0.5.
Also, is there even a single city of London’s size that is mostly retirement communities?
In Beijing robberies are 0.55 per 1,000. In Taipei it’s an unbelievable 0.0036 per 1,000, although general theft is higher at 2.12 (compared to London at 52.9). Are all these countries underreporting?
Singapore is 0.01 per 1,000. Hanoi doesn’t have published statistics but its Numbeo crime index (calculated from surveys) is 33.8 versus London at 55.3.
I think we can stop excusing London’s numbers.
Want a non-Asian country in case Asians are somehow magical beings who don’t do robberies? Ottawa is 0.11 to 0.13 per 1,000. Vancouver is 0.73 per 1,000. Sydney is 0.13 to 0.15 per 1,000. Dubai is 0.03 to 0.045 per 1,000.
London is supposed to be a global city on par with many of these others. So what is going wrong?
It’s hard to get good stats on Cairo, but its crime index is lower than London somehow, despite the higher levels of poverty. Same with Islamabad and Jaipur.
It always shocks me how people like to excuse crime in London. 70000 phones snatched in a year. 3000 stabbings a year.
The phone snatchings are so common that I can name several victims from completely different walks of life. Maybe the most mental incident was when a colleague's phone was snatched then subsequently ditched on the floor cos it was too old to be worth the trouble of fencing...
As a native Londoner I didn't realise how much baggage I carried wrt crime until I moved to Singapore and realised that leaving your front door open, your car unlocked or your phone on a restaurant table aren't crimes you apparently deserve to be immediately punished for.
It's kind of nice knowing that children and the elderly can go about their day without fear of crime or that women can be unsupervised at night without fear of violence. It's actually very liberating being free from the tyranny of crime.
There's also a scam where they contact the owner from abroad, offering to return it, claiming they're an innocent trying to activate a used phone they spent their last dollar on, or threatening the original user into unlocking it. They will say that they're hackers, connected to criminals in your home city, using your name and recent photos to say that they're going to expose your text messages. Anything to get an unlock.
> They send them to countries where they aren't locked
iphones will remain locked regardless of what country they're in. I presume you're talking about states who are seemingly unwilling to pursue/prosecute claims of theft?
My high level understanding is there are countries where things like IMEI barring aren't enforced and the actual unlocking of the phone is possible. Via jailbreaking or flashing I presume
there's still a fairly lucrative parts stripping market and there are extreme efforts that are used to "unlock" locked devices - it has been known in the Chinese marketplace that you could get paired chips to do SMD rework with a "clean" set of identifiers. they'll swap the SOC, the flash, and the wireless all for a few bucks.
older iOS devices as well are also vulnerable to having their syscfg rewritten via exploits, so you can "clean" a locked device that way as well with a good set of serials. Apple Watches are a hot one for this.
You can't activate the hardware with a different ID regardless. It requires the owner to relinquish ownership.
I'm sure this is different with different components of course depending on how granularly apple tracks their hardware—but the whole package certainly can't be activated.
Ever since phones became pretty immune to reselling-theft (steal phone, reset it, sell it) people have been snatching phones and trying to empty crypto, banks, etc before it locks. Some apps don't reauthenticate.
Bonus security on iPhone - if you long-press on any app, you can click "Require Face ID" and it will make thieves need your face again to open bank or sensitive apps. I did this for all my financial apps amd also email so they can't reset passwords. It isna minor inconvenience but would hopefully prevent an unlocked phone from being stolen and having bank accounts emptied.
Interesting point. The article linked in a sibling comment (about 2025 thefts) suggests that they are being resold. Which makes sense if it's a $2000 product that's so stealable. But I do recall there being a lot of difficulty resetting a phone that isn't yours. Do you feel the is article wrong? Are there ways around it? Is "pretty immune to reselling-theft" a newer feature than 2025?
If I have your unlocked iPhone, I could probably reset your Apple ID because I have access to your email and your texts so I can reset your Apple ID password unlock your phone unlock. Remove it from Find My and reset it.
It makes me wonder if there’s some way to put a third lock on there that’s not normally unlocked.
I’m almost sure that you need some password or biometrics to reset Apple ID, change Find My or change biometrics. Moreover if you don’t trust FaceID you can easily lock it (to ask for password instead of biometrics) when needed.
Activation Lock now extends to the serials of the parts inside every iPhone since Apple knows the S/N of everything. If you pull the battery off an Activation Locked phone and put it in another phone it's going to freak out and complain the part is pairing-locked and won't pair to your device but it'll be baseline usable. You'll just keep getting nasty nags in the Settings letting you know you're using stolen parts.
As of iOS 27 beta, there's now an additional "partner finance lock" status that will also be an available parts-lock status (to prevent a 'leased' device from being parted out).
Societies often try to address low-probability-high-cost risks.
City fire departments, car seatbelts, motorbike and bicycle helmets, video doorbells/home CCTV, car steering wheel locks etc etc.
The dangers are uncommon enough that the vast majority of people will live their entire life without ever having their house burn down or crashing their car. But they're common enough that in a city of several million people, the fire department might attend 100 incidents a day.
Eh, it certainly gets a lot of _attention_, and London is very, very big, so the absolute numbers are impressive-looking. The chances of it actually happening to any given person are extremely low, though.
Ha. I was in London for work and had my phone snatched on a work trip the second day. Kings Cross area. Massive pain to get insurance to figure it out and I had to buy a burner.
Two guys hopped a wide sidewalk, never stopped and were back into traffic in an instant.
Everyone gave me the "you should't have been dressed that way" response. Police did nothing dispite certainly plenty of evidence (video, from apple, etc. etc).
After you install it you cana "safe contact" or do the reporting on a website which will blocklist the phone's IMEI on all phone companies, block any banking app sessions and remotely wipe the phone.
It also functions as a public searchable database of stolen phones, allowing a prospective buyer of a second hand device to check it.
- Warming up for a run: Possible agitated tweaker, possible crisis
- Going for a run after midnight: Evasive solitary movement after dark
- Sprinting the last block home: Flight behavior consistent with shoplifting offense
- Running with a hood up in the rain: Deliberate biometric obfuscation
- Two runners meeting at a corner and leaving in opposite directions: Brief contact event, possible hand-to-hand
> amazingly I can find no way to turn this behavior off at all, never mind a more fine-grained control like, say, "ignore this event while the app I use to time my runs is in the foreground"
> (there is a global toggle for "device protections" that ostensibly includes this, but it was set to off to begin with so ???)
I intentionally did not set up theft detection exactly because I really don't need to get locked out of my life randomly because of inferences made based on someone else's assumptions about my device's accelerometers.
If your heart rate is up, Fitbits will recognize pretty much any rhythmic activity as some sort of exercise and start tracking. "Spinning" is a common one.
Such a silly complaint. Just file a request with Google for a run, and if you give them a few hours advance notice and verify that it's you through a video call with their AI authentication service, they'll put you right in the queue and tell you the range of slots that you're likely to get one of. You can use the time between now and then to get approval on your route.
A good example of how a wrong assumption ruins something (in tech, products, and life in general). I love the feature idea, but the assumption that a sudden brisk run equals theft obviously ruined it. Well, easy for us to say in retrospect, but my point is: don't make assumptions, test your theories, challenge them, confirm them. Scientific method rules.
Galaxy watch chirped “Great, you’re moving again” during a flight with heavy turbulence. I was ignoring the bumpiness until that alert put me on high alert and freaked me out.
Adding “running” to the list of things that Google engineers apparently don’t do.
Where it joins “walking”. Google Maps will suggest almost arbitrarily bonkers public transport directions to avoid walking. Personal favourite: the sensible way to get from my house to work, unless the weather is terrible, is six minutes on a train and a 15 min walk. Google Maps would, generally, prefer that I spend 15 mins on the train going mostly the wrong direction and 15 minutes on a tram, then a five minute walk. It will also contemplate a ten minute walk, ten minutes walking being within the threshold Google deems physically possible, plus an arbitrary amount of time on a rather slow bus. Apple Maps and Transit are better at this.
At risk of summoning an army of vibe coders, I wish map apps were more configurable and let you set "I'm happy to walk 20 min" or "someone can drive me a few miles and drop me off"
While we're asking for navigation features, I desperately want a "chill" toggle.
I drive around the NY metropolitan area a lot. No, I don't want to take the route that saves a few minutes if it involves merging onto I95 at rush hour with 300 feet to cross 4 lanes of traffic for the next exit.
I vote for a "lock it in" feature for motorbike riding.
I set up the route, clip the phone onto the quadlock mount, ride down the street and it auto changes the route because of something motorbikes don't care about.
Or it rains and that counts as pressing buttons.
And now I am riding and with gloves on so I can't fix it.
> And now I am riding and with gloves on so I can't fix it.
It doesn't fix the problem of bad software, but try adding something like https://glovetacts.com/ to your riding glove index fingers for this particular issue.
Yeah, I used to ride with a little speaker on one side of my helmet on the inside... nothing infuriated quite like a leisurely fun ride with the audio constantly telling me to make a u-turn or whatever because it found a route that was 57 minutes instead of 59.
I'd love a "I saw your suggestions, I selected one of them, don't give me any more suggestions" feature. This was on google maps.
As for detecting rain, that'd be a whole other algorithm.
This has driven me so crazy it’s about to push me off Google maps. If I’m driving upstate, I want to choose a nice straightforward highway route and stay on it. No, I don’t care if I need to sit in a little bit of traffic. No, Google, I don’t want you take it upon yourself to change my route to a bunch of back roads through Bear Mountain to avoid an 8-minute slowdown. I want you to just take me down the route you showed me when I started navigation.
I’ve had a couple times now where Google Maps has taken me into absolutely terrible traffic jams on back roads in areas where there is limited cell service. What seems to be happening is that there is a slowdown on the main road and a blind spot on the back route with no service, so Google assumes there are no cars there and no traffic, so it just funnels everyone that way until the whole route clogs up. Utterly infuriating.
All maps need to have an extra time penalty for turns, merging, etc. Even if the data is taken with an average driver, average driver probably isn't there for the first time, and for someone unfamiliar with the area any extra turn adds an extra chance to take a wrong turn.
It's amazing how bad this is in the Bay area. I wonder how map engineers don't dogfood. Or what is it that prevents them from making the maps better? They sure have no problem making changes that make maps worse.
You can do this already. Leave the map up, but silence all direction corrections. Then try to make your own way. If you already have the time to chill, you can take a little more time to think ahead about the route you’ll try. Make a wrong turn or exit and the map will still point you in the right direction.
Apple Maps suggests “your preferred route” as an option when you frequently travel an alternative path. In addition, all maps apps I know of have options to configure use of toll roads and highways.
Let me add to that: how about “no uncontrolled left turns onto busy streets” mode? Google Maps does this to me all the time and it’s infuriating, it’s up to me to avoid it.
For us in Australia it's uncontrolled right turns, and it is absolutely infuriating that many journeys would be temporally shorter if the route waited longer for the turn at an intersection with lights. Google Maps would almost surely have this data. It's been like this for at least a decade.
I love when Google maps in the NY metro area makes me want to take a left-turn, at a stop sign at intersection with a 6 lane road that doesn't get a stop. Yes, these insanities exist and are basically fucking death traps to attempt lefts.
It's a FOSS public transport routing engine. In the options you can select what type and how much time you want to spend on the first and last "mile" (even something like bike/scooter sharing).
It uses open data or data connectors for the routing. And being FOSS, if there is no data connector yet for you region, it may be interesting to contribute one if there is a sane way to query the data from the local transport compan(y|ies).
It's not exactly what you asked for, but the public transit and multimodal focused apps are generally much better at this stuff. I like CityMapper and Transit.
Neither is good for turn-by-turn directions, but both are good for "what are all the different ways to get there"
This already exists: in "Trip options", you can toggle between "Best route", "Fewer transfers", and "Less walking", as well as allow/block "Ride services" like Uber as a transport option.
How well these options work is another question, but "Fewer transfers" does seem to allow more walking. And of course you can straight up ask for walking directions instead.
Was about to write the same - those options do exist already.
It works quite well in my experience.
Although quality may depend on how well a specific city mapped out. Melbourne for example have options for accessibility (City consuls pays for mapping accessibility scores\options and I guess those details help to plan in maps and just generally a good city benchmark).
Preferred and connecting modes works well too - one can specify if ride service or drive is not an option or bus is meh. One thing I wish to have there is 2-3 presets of these options so I can quickly switch between combinations of - "get there fast", "get on specific time", "get with my most comfortable preferences". It's all there, just switching it every time is a bit of annoying.
Conversely, as a cyclist, Google Maps infuriatingly will refuse to route you along an expressway, even when it's the shortest or only route without a huge detour. e.g. Lawrence Expressway where it crosses in an underpass under Central Expressway. This is a long-standing known issue with Google Maps routings for cycling mode.
Yes. Transit App allows you configure both your walking and cycling speeds. Combine that with selecting which other methods you allow, and you get lots of options, and more accurate ETAs.
Here's a tip if you use google maps: if you want to get from A to B but can walk a bit, just pick a point C between them then look up directions to and from point C separately. Works great
Pro-tip: if you want to get from A to B without using Google Maps, simply pick a sequence of intermediate points A = a_0, …, a_n = B where each pair of consecutive points aren’t too far apart, and then travel to each point in turn.
What do you mean "but with a waypoint”? What happens if you route on public transit without a waypoint? Do you mean indirect spaghetti routings that seem ok to Google?
No I like to find out how long it will take to go to one place and then another. With driving selected you can add arbitrary waypoints. For public transit you can have one destination only. I suppose it makes sense because they like to tell you via schedule how long it will take, and the map would need to know how long you will stay each location. But when I’m looking I’m just checking if a route exists, not which time I will take the train.
Speaking of trains, that's another thing they don't do. The auto-snapping of current location consistently snaps to whatever road or goat track it can find nearby, while equally consistently refusing to snap to the railroad they have mapped.
Sure, there's not much need for navigation in that situation, but if you're trying to be smart regarding where I am, maybe take into account if I'm travelling at 200 kph before plonking me on a twisty gravel road.
Also speaking of trains, I can't zoom out and look at intercity train lines. I can only see highways. If I'm in Japan without a car, planning a sightseeing trip and wondering where I can easily visit by train, I can't do that with Google maps. The highways obscure everything and can't be turned off.
Well, in my opinion Google Maps is terrible as an actual map anyway, it's more like some vaguely map-shaped thing that serves as a convenient geographical background for displaying POIs and directions on, but no so much use for actually orienting yourself or getting a feel for the geography of a place.
And +1 to the lack of railway lines when zoomed out, indeed another annoyance along the above lines.
I'm still astounded by how poorly Gmaps handles Seattle ferries. The time and routing calculations always assume the best case scenario.
I've had it insist I take the ferry because it estimated a 5 minute time savings, when in reality there is a minimum 3hr wait for a boat.
This I can work around, but the truly awful behavior is that if you pull off for gas and then get back on the highway, it will automatically recalculate to the 'shorter' ferry route.
The only solution I have found is to add additional stops along your preferred route.
It does this same thing when you're trying to use a road that parallels the main highway. Sometimes I don't want to go 70, I want to go 45 on a nice quiet side road. Well even after I programmed a specific route, it keeps trying to take me back to the main highway because it found a faster route. Fuck, I don't always want the fastest route. I basically don't use any turn by turn navigation stuff anymore. I check routes before leaving, take a few notes on a piece of paper, and memorize it. Not only do you learn the route much better, you have much less chance of getting lost, and you're not constantly distracted by your navigation app.
I find it incredible that "modify the chosen route as little as possible" is not really a thing in any major mapping app. Just because I turned left instead of right at an intersection and had to detour a little bit before getting to a highway shouldn't switch the way I'm going by hundreds of miles on a long trip just because it's supposedly 5 minutes or some other pithy amount faster, and I have seen scenarios like this happen in both Google Maps and Here.
Yes but then invariably I will forget to turn them back on the next time I use it. Additionally, sometimes that 45 mph option is still coded as a highway in Google’s data, so you get a really obtuse route.
As for your other question, it looks like the guy was responding to an implied “I can’t turn off tolls as a hack bypass ferries because the bridge also requires a toll”. I’d speculate that it wasn’t obvious there’s a ferry-specific filter because the other filters show up as pills.
At least on Android google maps, there's an option to avoid ferries. But if you don't set the option before you get started, it's a pita to change options.
I don't have this option available on my Android app. I have "avoid tolls" which avoids both ferries and bridges. The main alternative to the ferries in Seattle is a toll bridge. Choosing this option sends you down surface streets.
But, I usually plan my route in segments... I'll ask google for times from Colman Dock and use the WSDOT app / notifications and my understanding of typical traffic to guess how long the ferry will take. Plus, if it's important to arrive on the other side on time, I try to leave an extra ferry, in case an ambulance gets to ride the ferry all by itself and I have to wait for the next one... if I knew I wasn't going to get on that ferry, I might have driven around, but it's a lot more driving for me to go around if I actually need to head to Seattle. Seatac is a maybe, ferry is usually better, but not if I'm competing with tourist or gameday traffic.
This might just be realistic about the median American's tolerance for walking. Most Americans live in suburbs that are not walkable. At least, I know my own tolerance for walking is very abnormal for an American, and it's due to having lived in walking-oriented cities like Berkeley.
Transit App allows you configure both your walking and cycling speeds. Works great (will show you 15-20min walking), generates lots of options on how-to-get-there (e.g. bike-on-bus, Uber to train station), gives more accurate ETAs. Also instead of reducing "public transit" to a binary, it gives you much more granularity in enabling/disabling which bus/tram/light-rail/mass transit/train options, and even which specific bus route numbers to prefer.
> This might just be realistic about the median American's tolerance for walking.
This might be unrealistic about the number and relevance of Median-Americans. Turns out more than a few Americans that are outside of the median own telephones.
It would also be nice to have a configurable transportation choice for the time to leave notice. Because some things I’ll walk to, some I’ll take transit and some I’ll drive and Apple seems to want be to just pick one and only use that.
My other map complaint is that there’s no indication of how much tolls are when comparing toll vs non-toll routes. Because if it’s $5 to save ten minutes, no thanks but for a buck, maybe I’ll do it.
This is especially bad in Northern Virginia, where there is a $4 toll road that saves 20 minutes pretty reliably, and also variable priced express lanes that will save time, but can cost up to $50. I want tolls on so it directs me on the Dulles toll road, but I also want tolls off for the $50 express lanes. I wish I could set a dollar threshold.
And some of the roads have a toll only at certain times of day, but they're treated as tolled 24/7. Some are free if you have 3+ people in the car, but there's no way to say "I have N people in the car, adjust consideration of tolls accordingly."
Unless that’s changed in a recent version, it was a global setting. As I mentioned before, sometimes I will walk, sometimes drive, sometimes take transit.
> So why are Fitbit users’ profiles able to be searchable in Google? It’s not really Fitbit’s fault. When you create a profile, the default privacy setting allows profiles to be found in search results (Google, Bing, etc).
That sounds like it's Fitbit’s fault to me, although I guess some blame has to go to people who bug themselves with a device that tells a third party about every moment they're having sex in the first place. Fitbit having that data isn't much better than Google or anyone else who isn't intimately involved.
Well this was 15 years ago, all companies were trying to jump on the social media bandwagon (Google Plus launched in 2011), and both companies and users had to re-learn what privacy meant.
The directions tend to be conservative in their assumptions. Like you won't walk/bike through a business parking lot to save 10 minutes of walking around the block.
A lot of tech is overfit to the product manager role in tech companies. One of the side effects of living in a bubble.
My Apple Watch is set up by default to assume any 15-minute walk is a "workout" and interrupt me to ask if I wanted to record it. No, I'm just going to the store, what is this "workout" nonsense. My Oura Ring was worse, it would assume any walk duration is noteworthy and my timeline would be a jumbled mess of "workouts". But these would be reasonable assumptions for a mostly sedentary office worker living in the suburbs.
I remember when a Google feature was announced long ago, some of the headlining features was plane ticket support and currency conversion. The average American gets on a plane once a year, to a place where they accept American dollars, and wouldn't ever care about these features. But these are important if you're in your 30s and travel is an important part of your life for either business or vacations.
They have big offices in San Francisco, and also in New York, Dublin, Zurich, London, and various other cities where this stuff matters, though, these days (their Dublin office is right beside the train station that it insists I shouldn't go to, because walking!). You'd think it would've gotten fixed at some point.
We've banned this account for going on tilt, posting unsubstantive, flamebait comments. This is not what HN is for, and we've asked you before to observe the guidelines.
We've banned plenty of your accounts and we'll keep doing it if we must. We all have grotty chores we have to do. You always have the option to make a positive contribution.
My main two puzzles with Google Maps are:
- on my timeline I have a few driving and motorcycling, and I have neither of those, I only bike to work. But my puzzle here is: how do they know that someone is riding a motorcycle or a car?
- when I ask it for walking routes, the estimated time is always way longer than my walking time. I get to the destination in half of time. So what do they do with all the tracking?
Google Maps has had glitched-out building outlines overlapping rivers in my city for years. I don't trust it at all. Citymapper is nice for public transit directions in cities.
But then, another Google product, Pixel Watch, has the bonkers default that if you just take a walk, like I normally do on most days, it considers that a "workout" of a dedicated type "walk" that needs to be tracked. It would vibrate rather annoyingly too. So basically every time I go outside to grab a lunch, that's a "workout"? But at least you can turn that off.
Following a route through a tunnel (less than a mile long), Google Maps on iOS zooms forward on the route many stops and many miles (5+ miles) in the tunnel. I had assumes Apple Maps was worse, but to my surprise it's quite good and doesn't have this bug.
My Apple Watch asks me if I am doing an outdoor walk everytime I am at Disney World. It sometimes takes 15 minutes to notice. Imho if its going to ask me this it should know every time I get to Disney that I am going to walk all day long and account for it.
My favourite, while being stranded on a trail with a broken bike: teleport across a lake, drive fifteen minutes, then hop on a bus. Apparently you are SOL if you don't have a car.
There are definitely better apps out there, unfortunately my area requires Maps for transit data.
Why only one app, and not several and choose the right one for the occasion? Mapy.com and OsmAnd are much better for trail use than Google Maps. Mapy has public transit info (depending on where you live, of course).
While I am on the subject, Google Maps seems to be somewhat aware of big awkward train stations which take ages to navigate, and applies a time penalty. That's good (though also a bit inconsistent). However, it seems to assume that metro stations are of zero size; you go in the door, and immediately get on any line. This is very not true in some places.
It's a very American take yes. I also like to walk more on either side. Simply switching to walking is usually not the solution because I usually need some public transit to cover the majority is the distance.
Don't forget driving in the bay area. Google maps will happily recommend entering 580/880/80 at Emeryville and going on 580 east instead of the much better entrance at 36 street that's 5 minutes out of the way.
Its also possible that its optimised for least walking for other reasons. If you were disabled in any way (like a wheel chair) or even an old lady maybe this is the better route. Or if was during a huge snowstorm or heatwave?
there really needs to be a configurable rules/decisions engine. I.e. i would prefer to walk everywhere, i will take public transit if it saves me more than 15 minutes total or 5 minutes per leg, evaluate this at every interchange node.
There are some routings in london for example where the best course of action is actually to take a train, get off walk 5 minutes then take a different train, google will always tell you to stay on the train to a point where you can change trains in the same station.
I'd also be able to tell it "never suggest that I get bus routes A, B or C; they do not in practice turn up on time".
> There are some routings in london for example where the best course of action is actually to take a train, get off walk 5 minutes then take a different train, google will always tell you to stay on the train to a point where you can change trains in the same station.
Had a good one in Amsterdam recently; rather than walk 9 minutes to the nearby central station and get a train there, it wanted me to walk 6 minutes to the central station's metro station entrance (which was a bit closer), get a metro, then join the train at another station entirely. Would have taken about twice as long.
Google isn't making arbitrary decisions here - it's reflecting social norms. Americans aren't big on walking. I've seen pictures of beautiful leafy suburbs that don't even have sidewalks.
This is overstated. At least as of 2017, Americans walked about 93% as much as people in France, for example, and a little more than people in Portugal or Greece.
I don't have sidewalks in front of my house but our neighbors all take walks - and walk to main street. A quiet street that sees a few cars an hour doesn't need a sidewalk to be walkable.
The other scenario of no sidewalk are like rural roads that are very long with nothing in between. So there sorta "no place to walk to".
I’ve been spending a lot of time in Mexico City. I had to abandon Google Maps there. The transit system has an excellent metro, a solid BRT setup, some electric tram buses that are fine and then the purple buses that run irregular routes, don’t always accept the transit card that the rest of the system uses, and are by far the most unsafe option, such that even locals won’t ride them unless they have no choice.
Google will always route me on the purple buses. Even when the metro is faster. Their directions in Mexico City make zero sense.
Google's mapper has an option for whether to minimize walking. Turned on, it will do things like this, prioritizing the route with the least walking. it would be quite willing to do this sort of thing. Turned off, it will prioritize based on arrival time.
There is a maximum walking distance, I don't know the limit but it's certainly more than 10 minutes. I have never managed to trigger it other than by asking for a route to a location miles beyond any transit options. And it did provide me a route across the Grand Canyon. (Most people are not doing a rim-to-rim in a single day.) (But then it was totally bonkers--offered me a bike route with a time that was preposterous. Looking at it--tiny portion by bike, then walk your bike--the standard rim-to-rim route. But it assumed bicycle speed. No--try that, you're going over.)
I have a smart watch; I still take a phone when running. It's not particularly inconvenient to do so. Lots of people don't have smartwatches, of course, and yet might still want to run.
> Why would you take your phone with you when you run?
Music, being able to tell what time it is, navigation¹, emergency calls², non-emergency calls/communication. Or, … the use case in TFA.
> If you really need to be reachable or to be able to pay for something in emergencies, that’s what smart watches are for.
… not everyone has the means to drop $400+/y³ on a watch & plan. Smart phone & plan prices are high enough already.
(¹perhaps more useful when I'm biking than running)
(²I've literally witnessed accidents while out on such a run. Having a phone is handy.)
(³we have to restrict ourselves to "the set of smart watches that are capable of making a call independent of a phone, here, too. If the watch requires the phone to make the call … well, that'd defeat the point. This is approximately the per-warranted-year price of a Samsung Galaxy Watch with LTE support.)
… between me & my partner, we own multiple pieces of exercise wear that has a dedicated pocket for a phone, because … you need somewhere to put your phone.
I almost always run with my phone. One of the few times I didn’t, I was on about a 12 mile out and back run. At mile 6 my IT band seized up in a way it never had and never has since. I could barely walk, much less run and I was six miles from home. Eventually, I managed to hobble about a mile over the course of an hour and find a business with a phone I could use to call for a ride.
Having a phone that day would have been really nice.
I, for one, endeavor to retain situational awareness even while on foot.
The author of this article apparently demands to run around with an unlocked phone. I have the same "Theft Protection" enabled and the only thing it purports to do is lock the screen. So I may never trigger it, because if I'm walking, or running, or bicycling, the screen is locked!!
If I cram earbuds into my ears and drown out the world, then I am functionally deaf; I cannot hear tires squealing, or honking horns, or victims screaming. I shan't go on about how my bone-conduction technology muddles up both music and the real world sounds.
If I'm checking my phone while I'm in motion on a sidewalk, I'm functionally wearing blinders, and not the good kinds like they put on carriage-horses. Especially at night when my glowing screen is brighter than the Full Moon! If my face is in my screen, then my mind is also not in meatspace, but my imagination is in Lothlórien, or Cair Paravel, or 40 Eridani in the 23rd century.
My mind and five senses need to be in the present and need to be in meatspace, or my feet don't belong in traffic.
Unlikely to be the product manager, but absolutely the product manager mentality. How can people live without our product? Reality check: people fucking manage in the real world. Especially those with limited means.
The parent isn’t looking for pure walking, they’re looking for transit directions that include a higher amount of walking in order to save time overall.
My tips would be: check if it mistakenly thinks you can't directly walk to the station or something. In my town there's a particular place i often go to where Google I guess just doesn't know or care that there IS a crossing. if I just pick a point across the street it suggests much better routes
And personally if it's more than 5 min of walking i would just look up the way to the station and then from the station separately with whatever modes i prefer
And lobby your government for sorting out public transportation to your block? It seems crazy inconvenient
> My tips would be: check if it mistakenly thinks you can't directly walk to the station or something.
no, it knows and will give a sensible route if you ask for walking directions to the station.
> And lobby your government for sorting out public transportation to your block? It seems crazy inconvenient
Dublin is far from a grid layout, and has serious problems with east<>west transport; there are a bunch of buses and a tram going east to west in the city center, and a few partial orbital routes in the outer suburbs, but going east<>west near but not actually in the center is a problem. They were supposed to launch a proper inner orbital bus route a few years ago, but it has dragged on; in particular it requires special buses, because double-deckers (Dublin Bus's fleet is otherwise entirely double decker) won't fit under the very old railway bridges to the east, and it requires some hard infra work around Heuston Station. But at this point they finally have the Special Buses in operation (there were a lot of teething problems) filling in on other routes, so not sure what the holdup is.
That said, given that it's 15 Google Map minutes walk from the station to office (10 minutes in reality; Google Maps assumes a quite slow walking pace), I'm not sure I'll bother with the orbital bus even if it ever launches.
> And personally if it's more than 5 min of walking i would just look up the way to the station and then from the station separately with whatever modes i prefer
Problem is when there's multiple stations nearby and which one has the quickest connection varies depending on when exactly you leave. In that case manually checking every combination of stations could be somewhat cumbersome, especially if there's a choice of stations at both ends…
Ok also true. In my google maps in public transport mode there's also an option to prefer least walking or fewest connections, maybe it's not available in some cities?
someone DID snatch the phone and then run off with it, but if it was up to me I would have mine without any gyros or gps sensors in it, in the first place, and instead a bunch of simpler features that I can only wish for.
the list of instant emergency activities now includes, sking, dancing,and running with automatic file screening for pedo content and who knows what else in state of trembling readiness to report and testify as the new default, you.
In a somewhat similar vein, I find that when I use my Apple Watch to track a hike, it will frequently auto pause or ask me if I've finished when I'm climbing slowly up a steep ascent. It annoys the heck out of me because that's often when I'm working hardest. My watch is also tracking my heart rate - and I think it's pretty safe to assume that if my HR is holding steady at 150 BPM then I have not stopped for a break.
Or at least give me the option to turn off Auto Pause/Auto End just for hiking workouts - instead I have to turn off the feature for all workouts. But I suppose that level of customization would be very un-Apple.
The world of appliances is littered with these "smart" features that purport to make life more convenient, but are implemented so crudely that they end up causing more trouble than they solve.
The Apple Watch is definitely fashion accessory first and fitness device second.
I can't use it running in the colder seasons - a sweaty sleeve triggers the lap count (tap the screen - no ability to reassign to a button). It's one of the most annoying and fixable (if they cared) issues on an Apple device I've encountered. Not even the ultra-premium, ulta-outdoorsy Ultra version lets you map "lap count" to the extra button!!!
It's just both (or more for the casual jogger than serious ultra runner for example). If you need a proper, dedicated sports device get a coros, garmin or suunto. Apple Watch is more leaning towards day to day, while these things are for sports and just for sports. But suck at day to day stuff if you want the fancy apple watch things. Pick your poison.
Pretty much. I have an Apple Watch, my wife has a Garmin.
I’m jealous of the advanced metrics and data she has on all of our workouts and the accuracy. And that battery life.
She’s jealous of all the slick bells and whistles (unlocking my laptop automatically, deep app ecosystem, managing grocery lists etc).
Neither is perfect but both have their uses. You have to pick a side (or spend twice as much and pick both sides ;-)).
The battery life negative on the Apple Watch is the big thing. I have an Ultra that is a bit better but I don't wear it say-to-day because the charging routine is a bit of a pain.
why do you want your watch to manage a grocery list? seriously
I can see it being useful to have a list on my wrist whilst going round a supermarket.
Maybe try a pen and paper, so you don't also upload every scrap of data about yourself to the Borg in the process.
Yea this sucks the moment you are shopping for anyone besides yourself. You can split up the items in the grocery store and be done way faster. Even alone, the person at home can add some last minute items.
Just use something self hosted like Mealie. I'll be shopping for what I want to make and then see something is on sale and can easily look up a recipe to add to the list as well.
maybe try your own memory, so you don't lose every scrap of data about yourself to the Book Goblins in the process.
i find it very convenient being able to, at any point in the day whether my hands are messy or my phone or a piece of paper are far from me, simply raise my wrist and say "add greek yogurt to my grocery list"
What metrics does garmin provide that the Apple Watch doesn’t
Mostly things like recovery time recommendations, body battery, training status, some scores, stuff like that.
There are tons of secondary apps that provide all of those things. Fundamentally the Garmin records less baseline parameters than the Apple Watch does for instance it does not do blood oxygen level monitoring, so whatever stats it’s providing are just software algorithms.
To my knowledge, Apple Health is the only health/fitness data storage with end to end encrypted data, which is one of my main reasons to stay out of other fitness eco systems even if their hardware is way better.
Garmin lets you connect your device as an USB storage device and manage everything manually though.
I do this to completely skip online uploading, and am keeping track of stats using a mashup of bash scripts and cli tools.
I feel like there has to be a middle ground between giving everything to an untrusted cloud and manually downloading raw data and building home grown tools to try and process and make sense of it. As a user, I don't want either of those extremes.
There is https://gadgetbridge.org, which seems like a cool project but I never used it since it is Android only and don't know how good the support actually is.
That sounds good and I will look into it.
Unlike a Garmin Watch it will actually take a charge.
Does your garmin watch not charge? If you call them and are nice they'll probably give you a heavily discounted replacement. Mine died on me randomly and they gave me a new 900 series forerunner for $125
It charges if and only when it wants to. And I've been a Garmin enthusiast for a while and been through a few devices already though I am getting sick of the charging unreliability.
Like if I am really careful I can plug my watch into the computer and it might start charging in a few minutes. Or like last night I made two tries and neither of them worked. I want to be able to plug it in to charge and completely take it for granted that I will come back later and it will be charged. I might wind up attempting to charge the watch for four whole hours in a day as it is now.
Personally I am very traumatized by USB connections that don't work and when I hear the sound of a USB device dropping out on my Windows computer I feel like a veteran who thinks a misfiring car is a gunshot. I want a charging connector which is 100% reliable and I want Garmin to pay me $10,000 if I ever hear that sound because of their poorly designed connector.
So I want a replacement watch that charges reliably, I don't want a cheap newer watch that has the same improperly designed connector. Next week I am going to be off grid at an event where I'm expected to have a reliable watch and hoping I can charge it successfully off a power bank at least once.
Agreed. I’m on my 4th Garmin and the charging cable last about a year or two at most. That said, for me it has always just been the cable and the watch is self last forever. All 4 of my old Garmin’s still work if I get them out of a drawer and charge them up. Now I just small USBC -> Garmin adapter's that normally get lost before they wear out.
I would love a standards based wireless option here.
I've never had that problem with my solar garmin watch.
I use the water lock which is a bit annoying when I need to actually swipe on the screen.
Yeah, if you don't need to track laps at all, that works.
But if I'm doing an interval set on the road in January, it's a terrible UX.
I want it off by default even for calm low HR outdoor walks. Nothing wrong with stopping a few minutes to admire nature during your outdoor walks! This feature was probably designed by the same person who thought it was a great idea not to let us switch off the screenshot sound.
Wild guess is that the screenshot sound is to prevent capturing video frames silently, which would be a workaround of the camera click noise that's meant to prevent covert photos of those unaware that their picture is being taken.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how would that solve anything? Couldn't the offender just take a video and screenshot it later?
If you are serious about health tracking, get a device that specializes in that and knows what they are doing -- get a polar. They publish papers on the science behind their technology. Many professional athletes do heart tracking with polar devices. Even Garmin isn't as good being it is a GPS company first. If you want mediocre, by all means get an apple device. Their goal is to sell you stuff and keep you hooked in the ecosystem with a veil of convenience.
Fwiw, polar let's you tune the parameters of when to start and stop recording.
I got an Apple Watch just before the pandemic. In the winter I love to XC Ski, but it wasn't in there as an activity -- I guess not much snow in Cupertino.
After a year or two of daily charging I went back to my trusty Garmin 935 that lasts ~2 weeks on a charge (used to be more like a month, but you know what I can install a replacement battery!) -- the Garmin does have an XC Ski activity.
I just checked and it looks like Cross Country Skiing is an option now.
But yeah I think Garmin and other smart watches are definitely preferred by serious athletes (and people who don't like charging their watch daily). Whereas I mostly just use my Apple Watch as a way to get notifications and as a glorified step tracker.
Strange. I've never experienced anything like this. I can forget it's on and stop moving entirely for an hour and the apple watch doesn't turn my walk off!
You can disable this (at the cost of having to remember to stop it yourself at the end). I definitely ran into the nag on harder hikes.
Interesting, and I though fitbit's (now google) auto start/end was annoying
(And yes I can turn it off)
I have a Pixel 7a on the latest version (Android 17, July 2026 build), and I'm able to turn this off. If you want to find it the long way, then tap through the following screens:
Or if you want to find it the fast way, open the Settings app, search for "theft", and then tap the first result and turn it off.For iPhone users, you can set up a Shortcut that achieves similar results because many snatchers will instinctively try to turn off cellular:
+ When airplane mode is enabled + Lock the screen and require password
Locking the phone is the most important thing. Losing the physical device is a bummer but it can be replaced and restored. Allowing access to any apps or message history is the worst case scenario.
I found this doozy from someone trying to test out the feature:
> After looking over Google’s advice, my key takeaway was that thieves are in much better shape than me, and run both longer and faster than this nerdy writer has in more than two decades.
https://www.androidauthority.com/android-theft-detection-loc...
Personally, the main situation I'm concerned about is on a bus or train, where someone grabs your phone right and exits right before the door closes. But I already avoid spending a lot of time on the street with my head buried in my phone.
Pull the emergency handle and get your phone back. If you live in South America you might even be allowed to use lethal force doing so.
lethal force against a thief of your smartphone seems disproportionate to me
I always agree with your statement when people discuss it from a purely theoretical philosophical/moral standpoint.
But when it actually happens to you, as I have been violently mugged several times. Oh, would I push that button - pull that trigger and I'd rewind time so I can do it a few times over. Cathartic.
These little fuckers hide out in alleyways late at night and they've made a career of it. They do it so often they embellish their muggings with other bits like choking and mock stabbing or slamming people's heads against pavements. So fuck 'em.
So your stance is that it’s wrong, but you should be allowed to do it because it makes you very angry?
What exactly would you think of anyone else applying that reasoning to anything in society? Would you think that they belong in society?
No, I'm saying it's only human to retroactively want to do extreme fantastical violence against people who have physically harmed you when you live in a society that a: does not care that you were hurt because you're a man and b: pressures men into fending for themselves, sorting out their own problems and "manning up".
I'm not the type, myself. But damn, no wonder downtrodden men end up snapping - because they most often have nobody to turn to and are forced to exist within a bubble that analyses their weakness and victimhood as much as women are for beauty standards, etc.
Okay, that is a lot more understandable and I do agree. Sorry for the uncharitable take!
Maybe, but these thieves might do more damage than just needing to replace the phone. Some of them will attempt to use the information on it for extortion or blackmail (which is why such a feature exists in the first place).
Don’t forget the lifelong trauma you get from a robbery. I know people who stopped using public transport after getting their bag violently snatched from them.
Whereas killing someone for stealing your phone will come with no trauma whatsoever?
Violence begets violence. A theft of a thousand plus dollar item is grand theft in the US. Ending a continual threat to society should be lauded not threatened.
How many thefts, by a single individual, is tolerable before society is allowed to remove the threat with permanence? Ten? A hundred? A thousand?
Some would answer one, single instance is enough for a weapons discharge. I would ask. How many times is allowable?
The criminal has no care for society, or its lives, so why should society care about that life?
Every life is sacred? Why?
What about the hundreds of journeys you'll inevitably disrupt? Should your fellow passengers perhaps be free to use lethal force against you in return?
I don’t mind being late for work if that means someone got their phone back and justice was served. I’m fairly certain my boss would give me a high five.
It is not emergency situation and in some city you would end up in big trouble/fine.
Being robbed is not an emergency situation?
No risk to life and limb.
Emotionally or psychologically it is significant but that's the traditional bar and blindspot.
Stolen phone -> access to finances (through password reset emails/SMS or just apps on the phone) -> no ability to pay for medicine/healthcare -> death.
Stolen phone -> post offensive things to users Twitter account -> fired from job -> lose healthcare -> death.
Stolen phone -> send violent threat against police posing as phone owner -> SWAT team shoots on sight -> death.
This feels debatable to me. I wouldn't at all be upset if someone pulled the emergency stop cord in that case. Getting hundreds of dollars robbed from you on the <whatever> is a big deal.
I've been running for 3 years with a pixel 7a, even doing sprints once a week. It triggered once.
But I keep the phone in a running belt, not in my hands.
Now that I think about, it the time it triggered I was pacing my GF and holding the phone in my hand. So it might be a much more common occurrence if you run with your phone in your hands.
Anyway, since I'm often in places where this kind of theft is common. I love the feature and I'd rather it triggers every now and then wrongly than not.
I was running on a treadmill a few weeks back, and was knackered so stopped abruptly by jumping into a straddle position with my legs on the rails either side of the actual band on the treadmill. My smartwatch interpreted this as a fall and sent a red alert to my daughter.
It should at least notify you and give you the opportunity to cancel the alert within a few seconds
It tried to, but a relatively new watch and not an easy button combo.
Doesn't sound very "smart" to me.
In fairness, a false positive is better than a false negative.
But many false positives lead to a real positive being ignored as a false positive.
In Sweden where I live you need to use the digital national ID whenever you make a credit card transaction via some app, for example when buying a bus ticket, so you need to have it with you at all times. But with the ID you can also take a quick loan and transfer all the money to a foreign bank basically ruining your life as the bank take no responsibility if the ID is used during the transaction.
Does the app not require authentication? At least MitID in Denmark requires a 6-digit PIN at the very minimum, or biometrics optionally.
Yes. Minimum 6-digit PIN (I don't know if there's a max) and you can enable biometrics.
The issue is that someone can look over your shoulder and memorize your code, if you use a pin in public.
Some people will use the same pin for screen lock and BankID, and if someone gets their code and their phone they can cause a huge amount of trouble in a very short time.
That's just their fault at that point, in my opinion.
Technically yes, but it seems like people's intuition for safe behaviour is worse across the board with modern technology, than it is with old technology.
Maybe it will improve by itself over time, but maybe not? There are a lot of things that humans generally suck at, and successful, human-friendly design must take that into account and work around it systematically.
Maybe phones/it/banking/payments/identity/authorization needs to be radically changed, in order to serve society well.
Giving away your phone would be one thing, but they also force you to give away your passwords and unlock at gunpoint.
When I lived in Sweden I had an 8-digit pin and biometrics enabled, indeed.
MitID (at least as I have it on Android) requires either biometrics or a PIN.
To help slightly I've set my username to a long string of random digits.
This may lead to unintended consequences.
Passwords are "protected content" that may be hidden in a web form, but usernames are not. Your username won't be routinely hidden by any ordinary password manager.
You may have difficulty when the need arises to share a long string of random digits with another human, or in writing. This may not ordinarily be a thing if more LLMs and chatbots are doing customer service, but if it's a government service, one day we find ourselves at a field office speaking with a civil servant at a window that is armored with Plexiglas, and nobody has a pen to write with, or scratch paper.
One of my colleagues said he was so clever that all his "security question" answers were random hex strings. So I imitated him, and it was very easy with the KeePassXC password generator parameters to generate a hex string of 32 characters, and so "my first grade teacher" was 0xf7a83392b12b1029ac3be7e029acbe7e; my "favorite color" was 0xa83392ac3be7e029acbe7f7a83392b17, etc.
This turned comical because security questions are particularly designed to be asked and answered in human conversations. Over the phone, the pharmacy CSR was not amused, and I lost a few accounts thanks to this ultra-paranoiac attitude and activity.
It's in addition to the existing security.
My username doesn't fit in the web form. Instead of seeing "Symbiote" (which can be read and remembered immediately) someone sees "Sym-065c7d6c-e0b3-4d——" with half of the random characters not visible.
People in Denmark are expected to use this system to authenticate money transfers and to digitally sign documents (e.g. buy a house!).
My investment account allows up to 5,000,000DKK (€670,000) to be transferred with this digital signature.
> and I lost a few accounts thanks to this ultra-paranoiac attitude and activity.
Sorry, but it's obvious to most people that you shouldn't just add a bunch of numbers here
If you want to trick the system, give a different (but believable) answer
In a world where some companies still think mother's maiden name is something difficult to find, give a "wrong" or "tricked" answer
(guess I just recalibrated my 'tism gauge)
Yes, you really shouldn't ever use a pin code for BankID (or your screen lock) in public. Only biometrics if anyone is watching.
Needing a government app to approve credit card transactions sounds very dystopian. Or did I misread that?
The app is owned by a consortium of Swedish banks, so you are using a bank app to approve the credit card / bank transaction.
At least in my experience, I only needed to authenticate with the app the first time I bought a train ticket, but I don't buy bus/train tickets in Sweden very often.
(But this authentication is annoying for trivial online purchases like this, so given the choice I prefer to use a physical card.)
It's not a government app, and you don't need it.
BankID (which is the one I assume he's talking about, and not Freja eID) is owned by several banks, but you aren't forced to use it. You can use a "bankdosa" (a separate physical device for auth)
Considering that the comments in the original article shows he is using a Pixel 7, the solution is obvious: give Google and its spyware the cold shoulder and install GrapheneOS.
I refuse to go running with a phone - too heavy, and too distracting, running outside is one of the few places I _escape_ the phone for a bit. So I made sure to get a fitness tracker with onboard GPS. It syncs to the phone later, when I return, which then uploads workout data to the vendor's cloud.
I look at the results on my PC with a web browser, phone is a passive middleman and is never touched directly for fitness tracking.
> and too distracting
Wait, you have notifications on? Why?
Maybe he said it as in you feel you have it with you when you run. I've tried many things (arm bands, phone belts), but I still can't find a good place for it. There's always something too tight, too loose etc.
You may have tried this, but I run with my phone in an elasticated belt that's just tight enough to keep the phone stable without being uncomfortable. I really don't want to fork out for another device just for running. (I also find a watch on my wrist annoying when I don't wear one normally).
Not the OP but I used to do that - problem is phones are becoming so damn large even the elasticated belt doesnt work that great anymore. Too much bounce.
I found a "belt" thats much wider and doesnt have a clip (has to be sized just right) that does work better. But a bit of a pain to wear sometimes.
For years I just literally ran with the phone in my hand (got used to switching hands and positions for comfort) so I could still do music and tracking. Not that bad when you get used to it. Eventually got a Garmin watch (cheapest with maps and music) which works great.
9/10 runs I leave my phone at home, but when I do bring it for some reason, I'm very happy with my "Flipbelt(tm)". It carries a 250g phone with no slipping, sliding or bounce.
My Flipbelt has lost some tightness after three years and many laundry cycles, but it still manages a Pixel 10a with no problems.
The belt rests over the hip and I usually have the phone flat on my backside. I don't really notice it after a few steps.
Fair - I have an iPhone 13 mini, which works well, but I can imagine anything bigger getting quite annoying.
question is _why_ are you bringing it on your run?
the OP says they want their run to be time away from the phone. Not just because it is too difficult to carry physically.
Ok, you don't want to fork out for another device just for running, but why do you need a device at all? And what if it is those "needs" that the OP is trying to get away from.
To have a small window of time when you are free from all the damn devices.
I wear leggings that have elastic pockets down the sides for my phone. Perfectly comfy. Not sure what the men's equivalent would be.
Do please link to leggings with pockets, I'll pass the info to some ladies I know...
For men, part of my "hiking pants" have zipped pockets that are big enough and placed well enough that the phone doesn't bother you when running or climbing or whatever. (Don't get me started on women's hiking pants, the missus buys hers from the men's section.)
leggings.
I go running for hours in remote locations by myself and carry a phone, watch and a satellite communicator amongst other things. It all depends.
A phone is heavy while running?
He might be running at relativistic speeds
It's also heavy before running
You seem to be shaking your phone in frustration. Would you like to submit a bug report?
That's an option in Google maps
It's also an amazing option on the Google app on the iPad.
Yeah sure, let me just shake my freaking massive tablet when I have feedback. What next, shake your 16" MacBook every time you find a bug? You'll have a better chance of quashing a physical bug than a digital bug at that point.
it is one way to enter the feedback screen, not the only way
I'm sitting at my desk browsing my phone and it gets locked with the theft protection alert. This only started happening in recent weeks. It's super annoying :/
Is "snatching a phone and running off" a common enough problem in some regions that this is worth having? Or is this a feature chasing after fears of the bogeyman, leading to concrete inconveniences like this?
> Is "snatching a phone and running off" a common enough problem in some regions that this is worth having?
Yes absolutely
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/phone-london-snatch-9.7204104
Thanks! Given this was CBC, my jaw hit the floor when I saw London. I live 20 mins from London, Ontario and 70k thefts in a year would be _insane_. Then I realized it was about London, U.K. and my jaw only hit the table. 70k is still insane, though.
Is it really insane? That is less than 200 per day, in a city of 15 million people.. a single gang of 20 thieves could likely manage that! The real question is, how does this compare to other cities of this size and demographics?
I'd say it's a lot higher than this. This is just the reported numbers.
I live in London and I'm fairly careless. Yesterday when I hopped onto a bus a driver told me I was crazy for holding my phone out infront of me and that it would be snatched if I kept that up.
I could list 10 people I know that have had their phone stolen at some point in the last few years. I've also seen it happen several times. It's very common.
200 SNATCHED phones a day is insane number, I seriously doubt in 10 times smaller European cities you will find 20 people per day with someone snatching their phone
Why is there a single one? If zero traffic deaths is an achievable goal then surely zero thefts are too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero
What exactly are you arguing and why? 70,000 is a lot of stolen phones. The number of thieves is irrelevant.
Why compare demographics?
I would expect a city that's mostly retirement communities to have less snatch-and-run thefts than a city where tourists make up a large part of the population at any given time.
Interestingly, Tokyo has a much larger population than London with a very low crime rate. I can’t find specific numbers on stolen phones (only lost phone statistics are published) but robberies/muggings are 0.04 per 1,000 yearly versus London’s 2.83 per 1,000. Seoul has a similar rate to Tokyo, 0.4 to 0.5.
Also, is there even a single city of London’s size that is mostly retirement communities?
The kind of crime in Tokyo that is happening may also just not be reported
In Beijing robberies are 0.55 per 1,000. In Taipei it’s an unbelievable 0.0036 per 1,000, although general theft is higher at 2.12 (compared to London at 52.9). Are all these countries underreporting?
Singapore is 0.01 per 1,000. Hanoi doesn’t have published statistics but its Numbeo crime index (calculated from surveys) is 33.8 versus London at 55.3.
I think we can stop excusing London’s numbers.
Want a non-Asian country in case Asians are somehow magical beings who don’t do robberies? Ottawa is 0.11 to 0.13 per 1,000. Vancouver is 0.73 per 1,000. Sydney is 0.13 to 0.15 per 1,000. Dubai is 0.03 to 0.045 per 1,000.
London is supposed to be a global city on par with many of these others. So what is going wrong?
It’s hard to get good stats on Cairo, but its crime index is lower than London somehow, despite the higher levels of poverty. Same with Islamabad and Jaipur.
It always shocks me how people like to excuse crime in London. 70000 phones snatched in a year. 3000 stabbings a year.
The phone snatchings are so common that I can name several victims from completely different walks of life. Maybe the most mental incident was when a colleague's phone was snatched then subsequently ditched on the floor cos it was too old to be worth the trouble of fencing...
As a native Londoner I didn't realise how much baggage I carried wrt crime until I moved to Singapore and realised that leaving your front door open, your car unlocked or your phone on a restaurant table aren't crimes you apparently deserve to be immediately punished for.
It's kind of nice knowing that children and the elderly can go about their day without fear of crime or that women can be unsupervised at night without fear of violence. It's actually very liberating being free from the tyranny of crime.
One would have to literally have one’s head in the sand to not know what’s going wrong in London. Or Melbourne. Or Los Angeles or New York.
Retired people a probably quite easy targets in this scenario.
Not if they drive everywhere
Even the CBC thinks of London, England before London, Ontario.
Poor London. (Ontario.) (Canada.)
They should have called it New London.
That's in Connecticut and it's older than London, Ontario:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London,_Connecticut
or 'Fake London'
The number is too high, but dropping: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdx4762znr6o
Why bother stealing iPhones? Is it just for the scrap/recycle->repair value?
There's also a scam where they contact the owner from abroad, offering to return it, claiming they're an innocent trying to activate a used phone they spent their last dollar on, or threatening the original user into unlocking it. They will say that they're hackers, connected to criminals in your home city, using your name and recent photos to say that they're going to expose your text messages. Anything to get an unlock.
They send them to countries where they aren't locked or break it down for parts.
> They send them to countries where they aren't locked
iphones will remain locked regardless of what country they're in. I presume you're talking about states who are seemingly unwilling to pursue/prosecute claims of theft?
My high level understanding is there are countries where things like IMEI barring aren't enforced and the actual unlocking of the phone is possible. Via jailbreaking or flashing I presume
Not possible on modern iPhones.
Pegasus installed via zero click 0 day exploit.
Completely owned.
Nobody is wasting nation-state exploits to launder stolen phones.
there's still a fairly lucrative parts stripping market and there are extreme efforts that are used to "unlock" locked devices - it has been known in the Chinese marketplace that you could get paired chips to do SMD rework with a "clean" set of identifiers. they'll swap the SOC, the flash, and the wireless all for a few bucks.
older iOS devices as well are also vulnerable to having their syscfg rewritten via exploits, so you can "clean" a locked device that way as well with a good set of serials. Apple Watches are a hot one for this.
On top of that a sizable percentage of theft victims don't even bother to report it stolen.
You can't activate the hardware with a different ID regardless. It requires the owner to relinquish ownership.
I'm sure this is different with different components of course depending on how granularly apple tracks their hardware—but the whole package certainly can't be activated.
You can send them to Chinese chop-shops and still turn a decent buck.
Ever since phones became pretty immune to reselling-theft (steal phone, reset it, sell it) people have been snatching phones and trying to empty crypto, banks, etc before it locks. Some apps don't reauthenticate.
Bonus security on iPhone - if you long-press on any app, you can click "Require Face ID" and it will make thieves need your face again to open bank or sensitive apps. I did this for all my financial apps amd also email so they can't reset passwords. It isna minor inconvenience but would hopefully prevent an unlocked phone from being stolen and having bank accounts emptied.
The email is what most people miss. Unlocked phone = SMS and email for most people.
Android Private Space https://support.google.com/android/answer/15341885?hl=en
Interesting point. The article linked in a sibling comment (about 2025 thefts) suggests that they are being resold. Which makes sense if it's a $2000 product that's so stealable. But I do recall there being a lot of difficulty resetting a phone that isn't yours. Do you feel the is article wrong? Are there ways around it? Is "pretty immune to reselling-theft" a newer feature than 2025?
If I have your unlocked iPhone, I could probably reset your Apple ID because I have access to your email and your texts so I can reset your Apple ID password unlock your phone unlock. Remove it from Find My and reset it.
It makes me wonder if there’s some way to put a third lock on there that’s not normally unlocked.
I’m almost sure that you need some password or biometrics to reset Apple ID, change Find My or change biometrics. Moreover if you don’t trust FaceID you can easily lock it (to ask for password instead of biometrics) when needed.
Activation Lock now extends to the serials of the parts inside every iPhone since Apple knows the S/N of everything. If you pull the battery off an Activation Locked phone and put it in another phone it's going to freak out and complain the part is pairing-locked and won't pair to your device but it'll be baseline usable. You'll just keep getting nasty nags in the Settings letting you know you're using stolen parts.
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/activation-lock-sec...
As of iOS 27 beta, there's now an additional "partner finance lock" status that will also be an available parts-lock status (to prevent a 'leased' device from being parted out).
https://9to5mac.com/2026/07/21/ios-27-code-suggests-apple-co...
Societies often try to address low-probability-high-cost risks.
City fire departments, car seatbelts, motorbike and bicycle helmets, video doorbells/home CCTV, car steering wheel locks etc etc.
The dangers are uncommon enough that the vast majority of people will live their entire life without ever having their house burn down or crashing their car. But they're common enough that in a city of several million people, the fire department might attend 100 incidents a day.
In Mexico, apparently, the scheme is to grab a phone from an inattentive pedestrian from a motorcycle or scooter.
Glitterbombs would be a fun solution except the guys doing would probably get pissed and do bodily harm...
Yes, its why those long crossbody lanyards are now so popular.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mggh4ll/a/crossbody-strap...
Massive in London.
Eh, it certainly gets a lot of _attention_, and London is very, very big, so the absolute numbers are impressive-looking. The chances of it actually happening to any given person are extremely low, though.
Ha. I was in London for work and had my phone snatched on a work trip the second day. Kings Cross area. Massive pain to get insurance to figure it out and I had to buy a burner.
Two guys hopped a wide sidewalk, never stopped and were back into traffic in an instant.
Everyone gave me the "you should't have been dressed that way" response. Police did nothing dispite certainly plenty of evidence (video, from apple, etc. etc).
It's a big enough problem in Brazil that the government has an official app to report incidents of phone theft:
https://www.gov.br/pt-br/apps/celular-seguro-br
https://www.gov.br/pt-br/servicos/comunicar-roubo-furto-de-a...
>an official app to report incidents of phone theft
I can't be the only person to see the irony here. Do they also have a drive-thru to report car theft?
After you install it you cana "safe contact" or do the reporting on a website which will blocklist the phone's IMEI on all phone companies, block any banking app sessions and remotely wipe the phone.
It also functions as a public searchable database of stolen phones, allowing a prospective buyer of a second hand device to check it.
Thats actually pretty awesome.
RTFM
Coming soon near you:
- Warming up for a run: Possible agitated tweaker, possible crisis
- Going for a run after midnight: Evasive solitary movement after dark
- Sprinting the last block home: Flight behavior consistent with shoplifting offense
- Running with a hood up in the rain: Deliberate biometric obfuscation - Two runners meeting at a corner and leaving in opposite directions: Brief contact event, possible hand-to-hand
Score increase the darker you get.
2036 crime prevention, detecting this behaviour and automatically forwarding it to the police to be referenced later for probable cause.
Pfft, police. Have you read Watchbird (1953) by Robert Sheckley? That's pretty much exactly where we're heading right now.
Or even taking a walk:
<https://archive.org/details/sim_reporter_1951-08-07_5_3_0/pa...>
(Alternate link: <https://archive.org/details/sim_reporter_1951-08-07_5_3/page...>)
The solution is clear - an "I am a tweaker" toggle.
>- Sprinting the last block home: Flight behavior consistent with shoplifting offense
That's the kind of thing I can see them doing because they don't exactly get a lot of downpours in SF
Huh. I have a Pixel 7 but I leave it at home when I run because I don't want a phone in my pocket. I'll have to try this out tomorrow.
Technically correct, though? Must be a thief, you are even chasing them or your other gadgets would disconnect!
Someone did snatch your phone and run off. It just happened to be you.
With the following assumption being present that the runner has Bluetooth headphones connected.
Wouldn't the simplistic improvement be to monitor Bluetooth single strength?
Is this feature able to be disabled? I'm slow walking my path to de-Google and use a Linux device for music and audio books while exercising.
Okay, then turn this feature off.
How often do you go on runs? At most 3x a day?
Personally i’d rather err on the side of it locking.
Also in that thread:
> amazingly I can find no way to turn this behavior off at all, never mind a more fine-grained control like, say, "ignore this event while the app I use to time my runs is in the foreground"
> (there is a global toggle for "device protections" that ostensibly includes this, but it was set to off to begin with so ???)
At the end of the thread, they say they've found the toggle, but it is greyed-out in the off position.
I intentionally did not set up theft detection exactly because I really don't need to get locked out of my life randomly because of inferences made based on someone else's assumptions about my device's accelerometers.
I thought there was an article a while back where devices could also log when sex was going on.
I believe in that case it was smart vibrator that phoned home info like device temperature and vibration intensity.
[0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/14/520123490...
If your heart rate is up, Fitbits will recognize pretty much any rhythmic activity as some sort of exercise and start tracking. "Spinning" is a common one.
Such a silly complaint. Just file a request with Google for a run, and if you give them a few hours advance notice and verify that it's you through a video call with their AI authentication service, they'll put you right in the queue and tell you the range of slots that you're likely to get one of. You can use the time between now and then to get approval on your route.
my apple watch triggers a high noise notification every time wind blows a bit stronger than a gentle breeze.
happened to us yestreday ob the london tube. Google thought someone had run off with the phone qwhen the tube train started up.
Mine did that once. Pixel pro 10
Are you sure it was "your" phone before the run/s
There's the Yanna9x approach to someone snatching a phone and running off.[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XHyi0Q8vrOA
A good example of how a wrong assumption ruins something (in tech, products, and life in general). I love the feature idea, but the assumption that a sudden brisk run equals theft obviously ruined it. Well, easy for us to say in retrospect, but my point is: don't make assumptions, test your theories, challenge them, confirm them. Scientific method rules.
Its not wrong though...
Galaxy watch chirped “Great, you’re moving again” during a flight with heavy turbulence. I was ignoring the bumpiness until that alert put me on high alert and freaked me out.
Yeah it triggers for me when I'm on the tube, ahahahaa.
But I would rather it do that than my phone still be unlocked after being mugged or scooter thieves'd'd.
I've also ensured I switch to esim so that they can't just eject it. Unfortunately they will still dump it into faraday bags.
Solution is simple, run slower!
Gotta stay in zone 2. Or your shins explode.
Adding “running” to the list of things that Google engineers apparently don’t do.
Where it joins “walking”. Google Maps will suggest almost arbitrarily bonkers public transport directions to avoid walking. Personal favourite: the sensible way to get from my house to work, unless the weather is terrible, is six minutes on a train and a 15 min walk. Google Maps would, generally, prefer that I spend 15 mins on the train going mostly the wrong direction and 15 minutes on a tram, then a five minute walk. It will also contemplate a ten minute walk, ten minutes walking being within the threshold Google deems physically possible, plus an arbitrary amount of time on a rather slow bus. Apple Maps and Transit are better at this.
At risk of summoning an army of vibe coders, I wish map apps were more configurable and let you set "I'm happy to walk 20 min" or "someone can drive me a few miles and drop me off"
While we're asking for navigation features, I desperately want a "chill" toggle.
I drive around the NY metropolitan area a lot. No, I don't want to take the route that saves a few minutes if it involves merging onto I95 at rush hour with 300 feet to cross 4 lanes of traffic for the next exit.
I vote for a "lock it in" feature for motorbike riding.
I set up the route, clip the phone onto the quadlock mount, ride down the street and it auto changes the route because of something motorbikes don't care about.
Or it rains and that counts as pressing buttons.
And now I am riding and with gloves on so I can't fix it.
Just "do what I told you" and don't mess with it.
> And now I am riding and with gloves on so I can't fix it.
It doesn't fix the problem of bad software, but try adding something like https://glovetacts.com/ to your riding glove index fingers for this particular issue.
I use osmand on my bike, it has a lock feature. And if you dig through the settings it probably has an option to prevent recalculation.
Yeah, I used to ride with a little speaker on one side of my helmet on the inside... nothing infuriated quite like a leisurely fun ride with the audio constantly telling me to make a u-turn or whatever because it found a route that was 57 minutes instead of 59.
I'd love a "I saw your suggestions, I selected one of them, don't give me any more suggestions" feature. This was on google maps.
As for detecting rain, that'd be a whole other algorithm.
> As for detecting rain, that'd be a whole other algorithm.
I'd be happy with a "phone is locked, maps is on display still, register no screen input" so nothing changes until I unlock it.
But "chill" feature is unavailable in New York city unfortunately.
This has driven me so crazy it’s about to push me off Google maps. If I’m driving upstate, I want to choose a nice straightforward highway route and stay on it. No, I don’t care if I need to sit in a little bit of traffic. No, Google, I don’t want you take it upon yourself to change my route to a bunch of back roads through Bear Mountain to avoid an 8-minute slowdown. I want you to just take me down the route you showed me when I started navigation.
I’ve had a couple times now where Google Maps has taken me into absolutely terrible traffic jams on back roads in areas where there is limited cell service. What seems to be happening is that there is a slowdown on the main road and a blind spot on the back route with no service, so Google assumes there are no cars there and no traffic, so it just funnels everyone that way until the whole route clogs up. Utterly infuriating.
All maps need to have an extra time penalty for turns, merging, etc. Even if the data is taken with an average driver, average driver probably isn't there for the first time, and for someone unfamiliar with the area any extra turn adds an extra chance to take a wrong turn.
It's amazing how bad this is in the Bay area. I wonder how map engineers don't dogfood. Or what is it that prevents them from making the maps better? They sure have no problem making changes that make maps worse.
You can do this already. Leave the map up, but silence all direction corrections. Then try to make your own way. If you already have the time to chill, you can take a little more time to think ahead about the route you’ll try. Make a wrong turn or exit and the map will still point you in the right direction.
Apple Maps suggests “your preferred route” as an option when you frequently travel an alternative path. In addition, all maps apps I know of have options to configure use of toll roads and highways.
Let me add to that: how about “no uncontrolled left turns onto busy streets” mode? Google Maps does this to me all the time and it’s infuriating, it’s up to me to avoid it.
For us in Australia it's uncontrolled right turns, and it is absolutely infuriating that many journeys would be temporally shorter if the route waited longer for the turn at an intersection with lights. Google Maps would almost surely have this data. It's been like this for at least a decade.
I love when Google maps in the NY metro area makes me want to take a left-turn, at a stop sign at intersection with a 6 lane road that doesn't get a stop. Yes, these insanities exist and are basically fucking death traps to attempt lefts.
Wouldn't disabling real time traffic data or using app not supporting real time traffic data solve this problem?
Depending on where you live there is Transitous: https://transitous.org/
It's a FOSS public transport routing engine. In the options you can select what type and how much time you want to spend on the first and last "mile" (even something like bike/scooter sharing).
It uses open data or data connectors for the routing. And being FOSS, if there is no data connector yet for you region, it may be interesting to contribute one if there is a sane way to query the data from the local transport compan(y|ies).
Yeah that's the main issue usually. Google has live data, otherwise I'd use something else
It's not exactly what you asked for, but the public transit and multimodal focused apps are generally much better at this stuff. I like CityMapper and Transit.
Neither is good for turn-by-turn directions, but both are good for "what are all the different ways to get there"
This already exists: in "Trip options", you can toggle between "Best route", "Fewer transfers", and "Less walking", as well as allow/block "Ride services" like Uber as a transport option.
How well these options work is another question, but "Fewer transfers" does seem to allow more walking. And of course you can straight up ask for walking directions instead.
Was about to write the same - those options do exist already. It works quite well in my experience. Although quality may depend on how well a specific city mapped out. Melbourne for example have options for accessibility (City consuls pays for mapping accessibility scores\options and I guess those details help to plan in maps and just generally a good city benchmark). Preferred and connecting modes works well too - one can specify if ride service or drive is not an option or bus is meh. One thing I wish to have there is 2-3 presets of these options so I can quickly switch between combinations of - "get there fast", "get on specific time", "get with my most comfortable preferences". It's all there, just switching it every time is a bit of annoying.
I wish I could add certain streets and routes to some sort of block list.
There are certain roads I would be willing to spend an extra 10-30 minutes driving to avoid. (And certainly would not get on them on a bike!)
Conversely, as a cyclist, Google Maps infuriatingly will refuse to route you along an expressway, even when it's the shortest or only route without a huge detour. e.g. Lawrence Expressway where it crosses in an underpass under Central Expressway. This is a long-standing known issue with Google Maps routings for cycling mode.
Transit (transitapp.com) supports setting your walking speed, which is essentially this by proxy, and it's a great app.
Yes. Transit App allows you configure both your walking and cycling speeds. Combine that with selecting which other methods you allow, and you get lots of options, and more accurate ETAs.
Here's a tip if you use google maps: if you want to get from A to B but can walk a bit, just pick a point C between them then look up directions to and from point C separately. Works great
Pro-tip: if you want to get from A to B without using Google Maps, simply pick a sequence of intermediate points A = a_0, …, a_n = B where each pair of consecutive points aren’t too far apart, and then travel to each point in turn.
I was thinking to myself “… doesn’t it have that?” then I remembered I was thinking of the Public Transport Victoria journey planner.
You probably don't even need any vibe coding for this, only vibe configuring some OSRM profiles.
The public transport app in my city almost does this well, it even affords cycling. But it isn’t quite as nuanced as one would like.
I don't think they give a flying fart a about their users anymore, but yes.
Yeah, this is the thing you can ask an LLM and get a confident and verbose wrong answer.
Not to mention “public transit but with a waypoint” which is too advanced for all mobile apps
What do you mean "but with a waypoint”? What happens if you route on public transit without a waypoint? Do you mean indirect spaghetti routings that seem ok to Google?
No I like to find out how long it will take to go to one place and then another. With driving selected you can add arbitrary waypoints. For public transit you can have one destination only. I suppose it makes sense because they like to tell you via schedule how long it will take, and the map would need to know how long you will stay each location. But when I’m looking I’m just checking if a route exists, not which time I will take the train.
I wish I could specify that I walk faster than most people.
Google Maps has an “Ask Maps” feature powered by Gemini, and I asked it for a route excluding two of the most direct roads.
Note: I have disabled Smart Features and there is no sharing into Gemini from Gmail, Drive, Docs, etc.
Ask Maps summarized my prompt, gave a correct answer, and displayed a graphic of the route as well.
Speaking of trains, that's another thing they don't do. The auto-snapping of current location consistently snaps to whatever road or goat track it can find nearby, while equally consistently refusing to snap to the railroad they have mapped.
Sure, there's not much need for navigation in that situation, but if you're trying to be smart regarding where I am, maybe take into account if I'm travelling at 200 kph before plonking me on a twisty gravel road.
Also speaking of trains, I can't zoom out and look at intercity train lines. I can only see highways. If I'm in Japan without a car, planning a sightseeing trip and wondering where I can easily visit by train, I can't do that with Google maps. The highways obscure everything and can't be turned off.
Well, in my opinion Google Maps is terrible as an actual map anyway, it's more like some vaguely map-shaped thing that serves as a convenient geographical background for displaying POIs and directions on, but no so much use for actually orienting yourself or getting a feel for the geography of a place.
And +1 to the lack of railway lines when zoomed out, indeed another annoyance along the above lines.
Yeah, I frequently wish you could get directions from your current point on a train/bus line.
Oddly, it seems to be okay at that in Dublin at least.
I'm still astounded by how poorly Gmaps handles Seattle ferries. The time and routing calculations always assume the best case scenario. I've had it insist I take the ferry because it estimated a 5 minute time savings, when in reality there is a minimum 3hr wait for a boat. This I can work around, but the truly awful behavior is that if you pull off for gas and then get back on the highway, it will automatically recalculate to the 'shorter' ferry route. The only solution I have found is to add additional stops along your preferred route.
It does this same thing when you're trying to use a road that parallels the main highway. Sometimes I don't want to go 70, I want to go 45 on a nice quiet side road. Well even after I programmed a specific route, it keeps trying to take me back to the main highway because it found a faster route. Fuck, I don't always want the fastest route. I basically don't use any turn by turn navigation stuff anymore. I check routes before leaving, take a few notes on a piece of paper, and memorize it. Not only do you learn the route much better, you have much less chance of getting lost, and you're not constantly distracted by your navigation app.
I find it incredible that "modify the chosen route as little as possible" is not really a thing in any major mapping app. Just because I turned left instead of right at an intersection and had to detour a little bit before getting to a highway shouldn't switch the way I'm going by hundreds of miles on a long trip just because it's supposedly 5 minutes or some other pithy amount faster, and I have seen scenarios like this happen in both Google Maps and Here.
Can't you turn off highways?
Yes but then invariably I will forget to turn them back on the next time I use it. Additionally, sometimes that 45 mph option is still coded as a highway in Google’s data, so you get a really obtuse route.
Can’t you disable ferries same as toll roads?
It’s not on the quick select pills so it’s not obvious but yes you can https://youtube.com/shorts/SA72d9VfsPg?is=F6zKWQNOkokN31F3
As for your other question, it looks like the guy was responding to an implied “I can’t turn off tolls as a hack bypass ferries because the bridge also requires a toll”. I’d speculate that it wasn’t obvious there’s a ferry-specific filter because the other filters show up as pills.
Link without tracking: https://youtube.com/shorts/SA72d9VfsPg
At least on Android google maps, there's an option to avoid ferries. But if you don't set the option before you get started, it's a pita to change options.
I don't have this option available on my Android app. I have "avoid tolls" which avoids both ferries and bridges. The main alternative to the ferries in Seattle is a toll bridge. Choosing this option sends you down surface streets.
I'm well aware of the washington state highway system. I live on the other side.
This is what my options screen looks like: https://what.pictures/route_options.jpeg
But, I usually plan my route in segments... I'll ask google for times from Colman Dock and use the WSDOT app / notifications and my understanding of typical traffic to guess how long the ferry will take. Plus, if it's important to arrive on the other side on time, I try to leave an extra ferry, in case an ambulance gets to ride the ferry all by itself and I have to wait for the next one... if I knew I wasn't going to get on that ferry, I might have driven around, but it's a lot more driving for me to go around if I actually need to head to Seattle. Seatac is a maybe, ferry is usually better, but not if I'm competing with tourist or gameday traffic.
The main alternate route is a toll bridge unfortunately.
That does not answer the question.
The only option is "avoid ferries and tolls".
Yeah at this point Google Maps has 20 years of data to work with it should work flawlessly in big cities.
This might just be realistic about the median American's tolerance for walking. Most Americans live in suburbs that are not walkable. At least, I know my own tolerance for walking is very abnormal for an American, and it's due to having lived in walking-oriented cities like Berkeley.
Transit App allows you configure both your walking and cycling speeds. Works great (will show you 15-20min walking), generates lots of options on how-to-get-there (e.g. bike-on-bus, Uber to train station), gives more accurate ETAs. Also instead of reducing "public transit" to a binary, it gives you much more granularity in enabling/disabling which bus/tram/light-rail/mass transit/train options, and even which specific bus route numbers to prefer.
> Transit App allows you configure both your walking and cycling speeds
Oh, nice! Didn't realise they'd added this.
I'm outside the US and I regularly get directions with 15-20 min walking.
You might be on to something.
> This might just be realistic about the median American's tolerance for walking.
This might be unrealistic about the number and relevance of Median-Americans. Turns out more than a few Americans that are outside of the median own telephones.
> This might just be realistic about the median American's tolerance for walking.
It's also realistic about crimes in certain cities.
The risks, such as they are, of walking in a city are blown way out of proportion to reality in order to sell ads or elect political candidates.
Care to expand on this implication?
Yeah, I figured as much.
Apple Maps also does this.
It would also be nice to have a configurable transportation choice for the time to leave notice. Because some things I’ll walk to, some I’ll take transit and some I’ll drive and Apple seems to want be to just pick one and only use that.
My other map complaint is that there’s no indication of how much tolls are when comparing toll vs non-toll routes. Because if it’s $5 to save ten minutes, no thanks but for a buck, maybe I’ll do it.
This is especially bad in Northern Virginia, where there is a $4 toll road that saves 20 minutes pretty reliably, and also variable priced express lanes that will save time, but can cost up to $50. I want tolls on so it directs me on the Dulles toll road, but I also want tolls off for the $50 express lanes. I wish I could set a dollar threshold.
And some of the roads have a toll only at certain times of day, but they're treated as tolled 24/7. Some are free if you have 3+ people in the car, but there's no way to say "I have N people in the car, adjust consideration of tolls accordingly."
I believe Waze has the second of those.
> It would also be nice to have a configurable transportation choice for the time to leave notice.
If you set a location, you can tap on “Travel Time” and select whether you want to go by car, public transport, bicycle, or walk.
Unless that’s changed in a recent version, it was a global setting. As I mentioned before, sometimes I will walk, sometimes drive, sometimes take transit.
"Sexual Activity Tracked By Fitbit Shows Up In Google Search Results"
https://techcrunch.com/2011/07/03/sexual-activity-tracked-by...
> So why are Fitbit users’ profiles able to be searchable in Google? It’s not really Fitbit’s fault. When you create a profile, the default privacy setting allows profiles to be found in search results (Google, Bing, etc).
That sounds like it's Fitbit’s fault to me, although I guess some blame has to go to people who bug themselves with a device that tells a third party about every moment they're having sex in the first place. Fitbit having that data isn't much better than Google or anyone else who isn't intimately involved.
Well this was 15 years ago, all companies were trying to jump on the social media bandwagon (Google Plus launched in 2011), and both companies and users had to re-learn what privacy meant.
Four hours and 15 minutes of "vigorous" sexual activity!?
Good for them!
Are we sure this was actually leaked and not deliberately 'leaked' as a form of bragging?
The directions tend to be conservative in their assumptions. Like you won't walk/bike through a business parking lot to save 10 minutes of walking around the block.
A lot of tech is overfit to the product manager role in tech companies. One of the side effects of living in a bubble.
My Apple Watch is set up by default to assume any 15-minute walk is a "workout" and interrupt me to ask if I wanted to record it. No, I'm just going to the store, what is this "workout" nonsense. My Oura Ring was worse, it would assume any walk duration is noteworthy and my timeline would be a jumbled mess of "workouts". But these would be reasonable assumptions for a mostly sedentary office worker living in the suburbs.
I remember when a Google feature was announced long ago, some of the headlining features was plane ticket support and currency conversion. The average American gets on a plane once a year, to a place where they accept American dollars, and wouldn't ever care about these features. But these are important if you're in your 30s and travel is an important part of your life for either business or vacations.
That completely tracks coming from people who work in a place laid out like this:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/JHQPdvSStnr6jfm77
They have big offices in San Francisco, and also in New York, Dublin, Zurich, London, and various other cities where this stuff matters, though, these days (their Dublin office is right beside the train station that it insists I shouldn't go to, because walking!). You'd think it would've gotten fixed at some point.
I used to work in the Seattle office, but I wouldn't have had the first idea how to get anything like this changed.
Do they develop any products in any of those offices?
All five of the ones named, yes - in fact Zürich is the biggest engineering center outside the US. The majority of Google sites do engineering work.
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We've banned this account for going on tilt, posting unsubstantive, flamebait comments. This is not what HN is for, and we've asked you before to observe the guidelines.
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We've banned plenty of your accounts and we'll keep doing it if we must. We all have grotty chores we have to do. You always have the option to make a positive contribution.
I suppose everyone needs a hobby...
There is (used to be? I'm not sure anymore) a Maps office in Tokyo too.
My main two puzzles with Google Maps are: - on my timeline I have a few driving and motorcycling, and I have neither of those, I only bike to work. But my puzzle here is: how do they know that someone is riding a motorcycle or a car? - when I ask it for walking routes, the estimated time is always way longer than my walking time. I get to the destination in half of time. So what do they do with all the tracking?
Google Maps has had glitched-out building outlines overlapping rivers in my city for years. I don't trust it at all. Citymapper is nice for public transit directions in cities.
But then, another Google product, Pixel Watch, has the bonkers default that if you just take a walk, like I normally do on most days, it considers that a "workout" of a dedicated type "walk" that needs to be tracked. It would vibrate rather annoyingly too. So basically every time I go outside to grab a lunch, that's a "workout"? But at least you can turn that off.
Following a route through a tunnel (less than a mile long), Google Maps on iOS zooms forward on the route many stops and many miles (5+ miles) in the tunnel. I had assumes Apple Maps was worse, but to my surprise it's quite good and doesn't have this bug.
I'm convinced the people working on google maps have also mostly never driven.
At least not every case world-wide. I do, however, appreciate how good it is for a completely free (I know, I'm the product) tool, though.
Osmand~ is better than Google Maps for walking and public transit where I am at the moment (Tyne and Wear, UK). Based on Open Street Map.
My Apple Watch asks me if I am doing an outdoor walk everytime I am at Disney World. It sometimes takes 15 minutes to notice. Imho if its going to ask me this it should know every time I get to Disney that I am going to walk all day long and account for it.
My favourite, while being stranded on a trail with a broken bike: teleport across a lake, drive fifteen minutes, then hop on a bus. Apparently you are SOL if you don't have a car.
There are definitely better apps out there, unfortunately my area requires Maps for transit data.
Why only one app, and not several and choose the right one for the occasion? Mapy.com and OsmAnd are much better for trail use than Google Maps. Mapy has public transit info (depending on where you live, of course).
Maps used to be a map with place information. Now it’s Yelp with a map. For most of my journeys, Apple Maps is more reliable.
While I am on the subject, Google Maps seems to be somewhat aware of big awkward train stations which take ages to navigate, and applies a time penalty. That's good (though also a bit inconsistent). However, it seems to assume that metro stations are of zero size; you go in the door, and immediately get on any line. This is very not true in some places.
It's a very American take yes. I also like to walk more on either side. Simply switching to walking is usually not the solution because I usually need some public transit to cover the majority is the distance.
Don't forget driving in the bay area. Google maps will happily recommend entering 580/880/80 at Emeryville and going on 580 east instead of the much better entrance at 36 street that's 5 minutes out of the way.
Its also possible that its optimised for least walking for other reasons. If you were disabled in any way (like a wheel chair) or even an old lady maybe this is the better route. Or if was during a huge snowstorm or heatwave?
It has a "less walking" option, which I don't have turned on. I assume that is for those usecases.
I think this likely has more to do with the NP Hard problem of generating directions more than it has to do with bad design.
Shortest-Path (Djikstra's) is in P :)
That used discrete nodes. Choosing “how far to walk” before changing mode changes that paradigm I think.
I remember Google maps working well for walking around in Europe. Ever since I've moved to America, not so much. Go figure...
This is in Ireland. I’ve also noticed it doing very silly things in Germany and the UK.
It’s fine for pure walking directions, but it gets unhappy about the idea of someone using public transport walking.
there really needs to be a configurable rules/decisions engine. I.e. i would prefer to walk everywhere, i will take public transit if it saves me more than 15 minutes total or 5 minutes per leg, evaluate this at every interchange node.
There are some routings in london for example where the best course of action is actually to take a train, get off walk 5 minutes then take a different train, google will always tell you to stay on the train to a point where you can change trains in the same station.
I'd also be able to tell it "never suggest that I get bus routes A, B or C; they do not in practice turn up on time".
> There are some routings in london for example where the best course of action is actually to take a train, get off walk 5 minutes then take a different train, google will always tell you to stay on the train to a point where you can change trains in the same station.
Had a good one in Amsterdam recently; rather than walk 9 minutes to the nearby central station and get a train there, it wanted me to walk 6 minutes to the central station's metro station entrance (which was a bit closer), get a metro, then join the train at another station entirely. Would have taken about twice as long.
Google isn't making arbitrary decisions here - it's reflecting social norms. Americans aren't big on walking. I've seen pictures of beautiful leafy suburbs that don't even have sidewalks.
This is overstated. At least as of 2017, Americans walked about 93% as much as people in France, for example, and a little more than people in Portugal or Greece.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/747380/daily-step-averag...
Jogging was invented in the US. I think it is more of a class problem than a nationality problem.
I guess it says more about people in France, Portugal and Greece.
The difference is: they COULD walk if they wanted.
You can't if there is no walkway.
I don't have sidewalks in front of my house but our neighbors all take walks - and walk to main street. A quiet street that sees a few cars an hour doesn't need a sidewalk to be walkable.
The other scenario of no sidewalk are like rural roads that are very long with nothing in between. So there sorta "no place to walk to".
Google has giant offices in NYC. Like, you'd think this would have come up.
I remember the time when roundabouts were round in Google Maps.
Fwiw I have a pixel and run a lot. It's never happened to me.
taking a bike is easier on your bones, though i don't do that either
I’ve been spending a lot of time in Mexico City. I had to abandon Google Maps there. The transit system has an excellent metro, a solid BRT setup, some electric tram buses that are fine and then the purple buses that run irregular routes, don’t always accept the transit card that the rest of the system uses, and are by far the most unsafe option, such that even locals won’t ride them unless they have no choice.
Google will always route me on the purple buses. Even when the metro is faster. Their directions in Mexico City make zero sense.
Google's mapper has an option for whether to minimize walking. Turned on, it will do things like this, prioritizing the route with the least walking. it would be quite willing to do this sort of thing. Turned off, it will prioritize based on arrival time.
There is a maximum walking distance, I don't know the limit but it's certainly more than 10 minutes. I have never managed to trigger it other than by asking for a route to a location miles beyond any transit options. And it did provide me a route across the Grand Canyon. (Most people are not doing a rim-to-rim in a single day.) (But then it was totally bonkers--offered me a bike route with a time that was preposterous. Looking at it--tiny portion by bike, then walk your bike--the standard rim-to-rim route. But it assumed bicycle speed. No--try that, you're going over.)
I have that turned off (I assume it would be even worse with that turned on)
> ”Adding “running” to the list of things that Google engineers apparently don’t do.”
Not with a phone, no. Why would you take your phone with you when you run? It’s bulky and annoying.
If you really need to be reachable or to be able to pay for something in emergencies, that’s what smart watches are for.
I have a smart watch; I still take a phone when running. It's not particularly inconvenient to do so. Lots of people don't have smartwatches, of course, and yet might still want to run.
> Why would you take your phone with you when you run?
Well, how would I get my phone back after I ran to the place I intended to run to otherwise?
> Why would you take your phone with you when you run?
Music, being able to tell what time it is, navigation¹, emergency calls², non-emergency calls/communication. Or, … the use case in TFA.
> If you really need to be reachable or to be able to pay for something in emergencies, that’s what smart watches are for.
… not everyone has the means to drop $400+/y³ on a watch & plan. Smart phone & plan prices are high enough already.
(¹perhaps more useful when I'm biking than running)
(²I've literally witnessed accidents while out on such a run. Having a phone is handy.)
(³we have to restrict ourselves to "the set of smart watches that are capable of making a call independent of a phone, here, too. If the watch requires the phone to make the call … well, that'd defeat the point. This is approximately the per-warranted-year price of a Samsung Galaxy Watch with LTE support.)
> Why would you take your phone with you when you run?
So you can listen to music? And most people don't have a smart watch.
It's fairly common to see people running with a phone strapped to their arm.
… between me & my partner, we own multiple pieces of exercise wear that has a dedicated pocket for a phone, because … you need somewhere to put your phone.
I almost always run with my phone. One of the few times I didn’t, I was on about a 12 mile out and back run. At mile 6 my IT band seized up in a way it never had and never has since. I could barely walk, much less run and I was six miles from home. Eventually, I managed to hobble about a mile over the course of an hour and find a business with a phone I could use to call for a ride.
Having a phone that day would have been really nice.
I, for one, endeavor to retain situational awareness even while on foot.
The author of this article apparently demands to run around with an unlocked phone. I have the same "Theft Protection" enabled and the only thing it purports to do is lock the screen. So I may never trigger it, because if I'm walking, or running, or bicycling, the screen is locked!!
If I cram earbuds into my ears and drown out the world, then I am functionally deaf; I cannot hear tires squealing, or honking horns, or victims screaming. I shan't go on about how my bone-conduction technology muddles up both music and the real world sounds.
If I'm checking my phone while I'm in motion on a sidewalk, I'm functionally wearing blinders, and not the good kinds like they put on carriage-horses. Especially at night when my glowing screen is brighter than the Full Moon! If my face is in my screen, then my mind is also not in meatspace, but my imagination is in Lothlórien, or Cair Paravel, or 40 Eridani in the 23rd century.
My mind and five senses need to be in the present and need to be in meatspace, or my feet don't belong in traffic.
found the product manager
Unlikely to be the product manager, but absolutely the product manager mentality. How can people live without our product? Reality check: people fucking manage in the real world. Especially those with limited means.
I'm not paying more money plus an extra monthly subscription for a cellular smart watch when my phone does the job perfectly well.
Are we using the same app? Google Maps on my phone has a selector which MUST specify if you want public transport, car, walking directions etc.
If I select public transport yes, it will suggest public transport ways to get there. I can't see how this is a bug in any way
If I select walking it will show me how to walk there no matter if it takes 15 min or 15 days.
I can choose which i want depending on if i'm tired or weather is bad...
The parent isn’t looking for pure walking, they’re looking for transit directions that include a higher amount of walking in order to save time overall.
But I don't. If I specifically look up transport directions it often means weather is bad or I'm tired. so no thanks please keep as is
> If I select public transport yes, it will suggest public transport ways to get there. I can't see how this is a bug in any way
It will suggest completely nonsensical public transport routes, apparently in an attempt to minimise walking.
Transit directions includes walking on both ends. Because the train doesn't start and end precisely as your destination (this is called a "taxi cab").
Ok that makes sense.
My tips would be: check if it mistakenly thinks you can't directly walk to the station or something. In my town there's a particular place i often go to where Google I guess just doesn't know or care that there IS a crossing. if I just pick a point across the street it suggests much better routes
And personally if it's more than 5 min of walking i would just look up the way to the station and then from the station separately with whatever modes i prefer
And lobby your government for sorting out public transportation to your block? It seems crazy inconvenient
> My tips would be: check if it mistakenly thinks you can't directly walk to the station or something.
no, it knows and will give a sensible route if you ask for walking directions to the station.
> And lobby your government for sorting out public transportation to your block? It seems crazy inconvenient
Dublin is far from a grid layout, and has serious problems with east<>west transport; there are a bunch of buses and a tram going east to west in the city center, and a few partial orbital routes in the outer suburbs, but going east<>west near but not actually in the center is a problem. They were supposed to launch a proper inner orbital bus route a few years ago, but it has dragged on; in particular it requires special buses, because double-deckers (Dublin Bus's fleet is otherwise entirely double decker) won't fit under the very old railway bridges to the east, and it requires some hard infra work around Heuston Station. But at this point they finally have the Special Buses in operation (there were a lot of teething problems) filling in on other routes, so not sure what the holdup is.
That said, given that it's 15 Google Map minutes walk from the station to office (10 minutes in reality; Google Maps assumes a quite slow walking pace), I'm not sure I'll bother with the orbital bus even if it ever launches.
(I always thought they could fix this rather neatly by building one of these over the canals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuppertal_Schwebebahn)
> And personally if it's more than 5 min of walking i would just look up the way to the station and then from the station separately with whatever modes i prefer
Problem is when there's multiple stations nearby and which one has the quickest connection varies depending on when exactly you leave. In that case manually checking every combination of stations could be somewhat cumbersome, especially if there's a choice of stations at both ends…
Ok also true. In my google maps in public transport mode there's also an option to prefer least walking or fewest connections, maybe it's not available in some cities?
It sounds like they want the shortest time, even if that means mixing public transit with walking together
Throwing me against the wall will not solve anything, Dave
Is this creeping brand rep protection? Rather like Meta glasses' recording warning LED.
someone DID snatch the phone and then run off with it, but if it was up to me I would have mine without any gyros or gps sensors in it, in the first place, and instead a bunch of simpler features that I can only wish for. the list of instant emergency activities now includes, sking, dancing,and running with automatic file screening for pedo content and who knows what else in state of trembling readiness to report and testify as the new default, you.
oooh now I get the meme posts with the duct-taping phone to hand visiting Paris
this is easily solved by buying the corresponding wearable made by your phone manufacturer!
/s
Or just get an insane case and bike lock the phone to your body. Now they have to steal you as well!