My phone detects going on a run as "someone snatching my phone and running off"
mastodon.gamedev.place50 points by luu 2 hours ago
50 points by luu 2 hours ago
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"
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"
Not to mention “public transit but with a waypoint” which is too advanced for all mobile apps
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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...
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 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.
You seem to be shaking your phone in frustration. Would you like to submit a bug report?
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
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?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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...
In Mexico, apparently, the scheme is to grab a phone from an inattentive pedestrian from a motorcycle or scooter.
Yes, its why those long crossbody lanyards are now so popular.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mggh4ll/a/crossbody-strap...
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I thought there was an article a while back where devices could also log when sex was going on.
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.
Solution is simple, run slower!
Is this creeping brand rep protection? Rather like Meta glasses' recording warning LED.
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