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> If the phone is rapidly moved a meter away from you, either it's being snatched or it's being thrown.

Good heuristics. Also that must not be a mainly downward rapid movement, which probably only means you just dropped your phone.

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A drop registers as no acceleration while in freefall, and then a sharp spike when it hits the ground. This was counter-intuitive to me when I first figured out how to display my phone's accelerometer readouts, but makes sense.

I think a lot of the false-positive cases where the screen gets locked are acceptable in context.

I mean, most people dropping their phone will be too glad/devastated that the device did/didn't escape harm to bother being annoyed that they have to unlock the screen again.

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