{"id":34202,"date":"2025-07-17T19:11:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-18T02:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/?p=34202"},"modified":"2025-07-17T19:11:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-18T02:11:09","slug":"apple-watch-sos-psa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/apple-watch-sos-psa\/","title":{"rendered":"PSA \u2014 SOS Button for Apple Watch Fall Detection is a SLIDER!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Emergency
It’s a SLIDER, not a button!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I want to make a public service announcement. Some of this you’ve heard about, but I wanted this to be a standalone article for people to share with their friends and family.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, I told you about how I tripped on a walk with my dog, Kepler. There was a concrete cover for the water meter that had sunk more than an inch below the sidewalk. When I tripped over it, I flipped nose first onto the concrete. I had no time to even get my hands up to help break the fall.<\/p>\n

When I fell, my Apple Watch noted that it looked like I’d taken a hard fall and offered to call emergency services. Even in my state of shock, I knew the right answer to this question, and immediately pushed the red, circular SOS button. But nothing happened. So I pushed it again, and again, and again, and nothing happened.<\/p>\n

Guess what? It’s a SLIDER, not a button!<\/p>\n

If you look closely at the screenshot in the shownotes, you’ll see that the round, red SOS button is sitting inside a rounded rectangle that says “Emergency Call”. Evidently, Apple thinks that it’s obvious that the Emergency call part of the rounded rectangle is a slot that you were supposed to slide the SOS button across.<\/p>\n

I can tell you that in all the time I’ve been looking at this button over the years since it was implemented in the Apple Watch, I never noticed the slot and always thought it was a button. Perhaps you are more observant than I am, and would be more observant with blood gushing out of your nose than I was, but it never occurred to me it was a slider.<\/p>\n

I was also under the impression that if you didn’t dismiss this alert, the Apple Watch would automatically call emergency services. While bleeding on the sidewalk, I did not take the time to read the Apple support documentation<\/a>, where they explain that the only time emergency services will be contacted automatically is if you do not move for one minute.<\/p>\n

It would be good news to me if everyone who hears this PSA from me thinks to themselves, “I always thought it was a slider…”, but if there’s just one of you out there who thought it was a button too, then it was worth me writing this public service announcement.<\/p>\n

\"an
The Scene of the Crime<\/br>(the city has since fixed it)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s a SLIDER, not a button! I want to make a public service announcement. Some of this you’ve heard about, but I wanted this to be a standalone article for people to share with their friends and family. A few weeks ago, I told you about how I tripped on a walk with my dog, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34052,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[147],"tags":[208,929,5784,7538],"class_list":["post-34202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-posts","tag-apple-watch","tag-emergency","tag-emergency-sos","tag-fall-detection"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Emergency-SOS-Screen-on-Apple-Watch-1040x520-1.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34202"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34207,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34202\/revisions\/34207"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}