Author was riding on a motorcycle with the feature enabled, and dropped his phone in a way that was indistinguishable from a crash (which he admits). The author even says he's grateful the feature exists.
But then says "But surely there's a better way of detecting real crashes". Okay? What do he think that might be? No suggestions are made at all.
Notification on the watch is a reasonable and safe change.
I wonder too whether a filter could be applied for situations where the phone detects massive acceleration, but the watch does not. It's hard to imagine a scenario where 1) a crash occurs, 2) the phone imu detects it, but 3) the watch imu do not.
If the phone is in the pocket of the rider at the time of accident, this can be detected using the proximity sensor or nominal accelerometer data crosschecked with GPS velocity, or even capacitive sensing.
EDIT: There are only three possible states before the crash. Either the phone is in the rider's pocket, or it is mounted to the vehicle, or it is held in the user's hand. If the phone is in the rider's pocket, it is going to stay there until the rider feels a strong impact. If the phone is in the rider's hand, then the phone should turn this off completely because it's far more likely to slip. If the phone is attached to the vehicle, it should only register a crash if it begins simultaneously with the phone being disconnected to the vehicle (if it is to begin with).
The fact that the three may be separated is irrelevant, because they will be separated after the crash begins. As long as the phone mount is sturdy enough not to separate under normal conditions, this is fine. If it is not, then a false positive is much more likely than a true positive. And a crash sensor with more false positives than true positives is actively harmful.
This only applies to two wheeled vehicles, obviously. For four wheeled vehicles, the way it's working right now is fine. It is pretty trivial for a phone to make the difference between a car and a bike.
A feature with that many false positives can be actively harmful. It's not responsible engineering to ship it. Especially if you lock it to specialized hardware, then you have no excuse not to go all the way and at least have a proximity sensor at the back.
Apple clearly chose to accept false positives in order to avoid false negatives. I'm pretty sure their engineers and lawyers have given this more thought than you have from your armchair in the one hour since this was posted.
In this case, the phone is being disconnected from the bike while receiving a small amount of force, and then hitting the ground with great force.
EDIT:
In a one vehicle accident where the driver lowsides onto gravel, the phone will receive a lot of forces as the bike deccelerates or tumbles, and this force will start when the phone is still attached to the bike.
If you don’t have a cellular watch it’d just keep on working like it has been. False negative and all.
But if the watch was there… Crash detection could just use the “everything is fine” feature by pushing it down from the cloud to both phone and watch simultaneously.
I’m actually surprised this isn’t how it works.
As you lift up one hand to look at the watch, and the other to dismiss the alert, suddenly you are completely unable to control your motorcycle and then really have a crash!
Doesn’t seem to be that great!
Imagining scenarios that would be workable, that's harder. The chances of the above are not zero... stranger things have happened (and that's from what we've seen on video, let alone what's not captured on film).
— latest article headline from this author
[Edit] to clarify: trillion dollar company or not, a new feature was just released a someone noticed what seems to be an edge case where does feature isn't providing value. Feedback is good.
Then Apple would actually be justified in locking this feature to some models, as if normal accelerometers didn't already go to 16G+ :)
EDIT:
I feel like I may have been unclear. I'm saying the phone should detect if it's being detached from the bike before or after the crash, using a magnetic sensor preferably (since Apple already has their magnetic attachement thing).
If the phone is disconnected from the vehicle before it senses a crash, then it's a false positive. If the phone is disconnected at the same time, or less than a certain before sensing a very strong shock, then this is a true positive.