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.
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".
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"
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Who cares? They'll all be fired in a few months and swapped for LLM coders. Have you tried routing between Kimi K3 and Fable? Fireworks put out an article on it.
People still writing code but it's now below a minimum wage job in terms of economic value addition. It's a waste of human time and energy.
Smart people need to learn biology or something that actually has value, like Jensen has been saying for years.
An LLM could develop it for them anywhere on earth. Why waste a human's valuable time on minimum wage robot work like programming? It's not 2025 anymore. Wake up!
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
… 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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
> 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.
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?
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
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.
> 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.
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’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.
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.
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.
- 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
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 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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 :/
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 ???)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I remember the time when roundabouts were round in Google Maps.
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.
Google has giant offices in NYC. Like, you'd think this would have come up.
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".
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
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!)
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.
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.
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
Yeah, this is the thing you can ask an LLM and get a confident and verbose wrong answer.
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.
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.
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.
But "chill" feature is unavailable in New York city unfortunately.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
I wish I could specify that I walk faster than most people.
Transit (transitapp.com) supports setting your walking speed, which is essentially this by proxy, and it's a great app.
I don't think they give a flying fart a about their users anymore, but yes.
I was thinking to myself “… doesn’t it have that?” then I remembered I was thinking of the Public Transport Victoria journey planner.
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.
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."
> 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.
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.
Who cares? They'll all be fired in a few months and swapped for LLM coders. Have you tried routing between Kimi K3 and Fable? Fireworks put out an article on it.
People still writing code but it's now below a minimum wage job in terms of economic value addition. It's a waste of human time and energy.
Smart people need to learn biology or something that actually has value, like Jensen has been saying for years.
An LLM could develop it for them anywhere on earth. Why waste a human's valuable time on minimum wage robot work like programming? It's not 2025 anymore. Wake up!
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.
Oddly, it seems to be okay at that in Dublin at least.
Yeah, I frequently wish you could get directions from your current point on a train/bus line.
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.
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.
Fwiw I have a pixel and run a lot. It's never happened to me.
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.
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'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.
Can’t you disable ferries same as toll roads?
The main alternate route is a toll bridge unfortunately.
That does not answer the question.
The only option is "avoid ferries and tolls".
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.
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.
Yeah at this point Google Maps has 20 years of data to work with it should work flawlessly in big cities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> ”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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.)
I'm not paying more money plus an extra monthly subscription for a cellular smart watch when my phone does the job perfectly well.
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.
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.
Care to expand on this implication?
Yeah, I figured as much.
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.
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?
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...
It sounds like they want the shortest time, even if that means mixing public transit with walking together
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
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
> 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.
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.
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.
"Sexual Activity Tracked By Fitbit Shows Up In Google Search Results"
https://techcrunch.com/2011/07/03/sexual-activity-tracked-by...
Four hours and 15 minutes of "vigorous" sexual activity!?
> 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.
taking a bike is easier on your bones, though i don't do that either
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The solution is clear - an "I am a tweaker" toggle.
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...>)
>- 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
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.
Even the CBC thinks of London, England before London, Ontario.
Poor London. (Ontario.) (Canada.)
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?
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.
Retired people a probably quite easy targets in this scenario.
Not if they drive everywhere
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.
What exactly are you arguing and why? 70,000 is a lot of stolen phones. The number of thieves is irrelevant.
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
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?
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.
You can send them to Chinese chop-shops and still turn a decent buck.
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.
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?
RTFM
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
The email is what most people miss. Unlocked phone = SMS and email for most people.
Yes, its why those long crossbody lanyards are now so popular.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mggh4ll/a/crossbody-strap...
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...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 :/
You seem to be shaking your phone in frustration. Would you like to submit a bug report?
That's an option in Google maps
Are you sure it was "your" phone before the run/s
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).
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.
Fair - I have an iPhone 13 mini, which works well, but I can imagine anything bigger getting quite annoying.
I wear leggings that have elastic pockets down the sides for my phone. Perfectly comfy. Not sure what the men's equivalent would be.
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.
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.
There's the Yanna9x approach to someone snatching a phone and running off.[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XHyi0Q8vrOA
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mine did that once. Pixel pro 10
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 ???)
my apple watch triggers a high noise notification every time wind blows a bit stronger than a gentle breeze.
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.
I thought there was an article a while back where devices could also log when sex was going on.
Its not wrong though...
Solution is simple, run slower!
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!