Your iPhone 14 might confuse a rollercoaster ride for a car crash
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The next time you ride a roller coaster, you may want to leave your iPhone 14 behind as users are reporting that their device crash detection is caused by the fast motion.
Crash detection is one of the best new safety features of the iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Pro, and Apple Watch 8. Using internal gyroscopes and other sensors, these Apple devices can detect if you’ve been involved in a car accident and automatically call emergency services or alert your contacts to emergencies. It’s not perfect, but Apple also gives users the option to manually cancel the alert within 10 seconds if their iPhone accidentally detects a crash.
However, if you’re stuck on a roller coaster, you can’t easily cancel this warning, and as some users have discovered (via The Wall Street Journal (opens in new tab)) this means that emergency services and contacts are alerted to an accident that never happened.
We’ve reached out to Apple about the situation and to find out if it has a fix for the issue, if we hear anything we’ll update this piece with what they say.
Analysis: The iPhone that the wolf howled
If the feature is to be imperfect, we’d rather the iPhone 14 crash detection be too sensitive than not sensitive enough. But if it continues to scare emergency contacts and services with false positives, Apple’s crash-detection software could soon follow the parable of “the boy who howled the wolf.”
So what can you do?
If you’re going on a roller coaster ride or participating in any other activity that could cause crash detection, you may want to turn off crash detection on your iPhone or Apple Watch.
To do this on an Apple Watch 8, Apple Watch SE 2, and Apple Watch Ultra, you must first open the Watch app on your paired iPhone. On the My Watch tab, tap Emergency SOS and go to the Crash Detection section. Here you should see a switch for Call after severe crash that you can toggle to Off and then confirm.
On your iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Plus, iPhone 14 Pro or iPhone 14 Pro Max, you need to go to your phone’s Settings app and then Emergency SOS. Again, you need to disable Call After Severe Crash and then click confirm.
In either case, you don’t actually disable Crash Detection, just the warnings. This makes the service much less annoying if you find it picking up a ton of non-existent crashes.
That said, turning crash detection off can be a problem if you then forget to turn it back on. Instead, we’d prefer a quick Do Not DIsturb style setting, perhaps called Amusement Park Mode, where you can disable Crash Detection alerts for a period of time, with your iPhone reminding you that the feature has been disabled via an icon at the top the screen. Alternatively, it may send you regular updates to remind you that amusement park mode is turned on so you eventually remember to turn it off.
We’ll have to wait and see if Apple comes up with a fix soon, otherwise their latest security feature could turn out to be the most annoying one instead.
Looking for more ways to use your iPhone? Check out our picks for the best iPhone apps.