iPhone Performance Management

Today I experienced an unexpected shutdown on my iPhone 6 Plus (iOS 12.0.1). I do not recall the phone warning me that I had 20% battery life left, so it struck me as unusual for the phone to shut down. Rather than immediately charging my phone, I waited a few minutes, pressed the power button, and saw this message:

This reminded me of the Batterygate controversy that arose several months ago. Curious to learn more about the Performance Management feature that had been applied to my phone, I navigated to the Settings > Battery and found this:

Tapping on "Learn more..." took me to the iPhone Battery and Performance page on Apple Support. In my humble opinion, I think it does a good job of explaining how lithium-ion batteries chemically age over time and how iOS can manage performance peaks to prevent unexpected shutdowns.

As you can see, my battery's maximum capacity is at 83%, and I've noticed in recent months that I've had to charge my phone slightly more often than in the past. Also notice that there is a "Disable..." option that turns off Performance Management. According to the Apple Support page, if you disable performance management, you can't turn it back on, but it will be turned on again automatically if another unexpected shutdown occurs.

I'll be leaving Performance Management enabled, and I don't buy into the allegation that Apple has throttled iPhones just to get people to upgrade. Many years ago, my iPhone 5 had experienced frequent unexpected shutdowns as it aged (especially when my battery level dipped below 25-30%), and I even wish that performance management was available back then to improve my user experience.

Force-Refresh Data on iOS Health App

I use the iOS Health app on my iPhone from time to time to review my walking + running distances. I've written in the past about distance tracking accuracy here and about a strange issue here. I also want to highlight that I find it inconvenient at times when I launch the Health app, only to find that it has yet to update walking + running distances from the past several hours. Example:

      

In the screenshot on the left, notice that the time is 5:27 PM and that no walking or running activity has been registered since 7:00 AM. At this time, the total distance is 0.59 miles. Tapping on "Show All Data" yields the screenshot in the middle, and it shows that the total distance for the day is actually 5 miles. Tapping on "Back" takes us back to the original Walking + Running Distance screen which now displays recorded distances from 8:00 AM to 5:27 PM, including the 5 total miles spread throughout the day.

This issue has occurred on my iPhone for the past several months, and only recently did I discover that navigating to the "Show All Data" screen forces a refresh. Maybe this is a bug that can be fixed in a future release.

Inconceivably Regular Activity

The Apple iOS Health app on my phone (iPhone 6 Plus, iOS 12.0.1) suits my simple needs. It tracks my walking + running distance and lets me view my activity data in increments of days, weeks, months, and even years. Since I don't use any GPS-enabled apps to accurately track my distances, I've compared known running distances against Apple Health and have found it to be fairly accurate. However, something strange happened the other day. I noticed that Health was registering just under 0.2 miles/hour for every hour of the day:

      

On October 24 (left image), the Health app correctly logged the distances that I logged at 7 AM and 8 AM as I walked my child to school and walked back home. Then at 4 PM, it began recording distances of just under 0.2 miles/hour for the remainder of the day. This continued for all 24 hours of October 25 (center image) and lasted until 9 AM on October 26 (right image).

Obviously I did not really perform that activity at such a regular pace for 42 straight hours. I also did not place the phone on a vibrating surface or any other surface that was in motion for that time frame. In fact, I had a pretty normal routine where I left the phone on my desk while working and picked it up only to make phone calls, use mobile apps, or when leaving home.

The total distance of 4.5 miles on October 25 is a little on the low side since I walked my child to school (round trip of 1.75 miles) and ran/walked 3.75 miles (my usual route) which adds up to 5.5 miles, so maybe the app was simply not recognizing movement correctly for that 42-hour timespan. That being said, I suppose this could be within the margin of error of distance tracking without a GPS. Thinking about possible data corruption issues, I don't recall my iPhone crashing or being dropped during that time, nor had I experienced an unexpected shutdown due to complete battery drainage.

So I'm not quite sure what happened, but in the last 48+ hours (it's now October 28), the app appears to have returned to normal activity tracking. If you've seen this sort of strangely consistent recorded activity on your iOS Health app or even know why this is happening, let me know.

Selficide

A recent study explores the causes of selfie-related deaths and the distribution of deaths across age, gender, and country. Here are the tables figures:

Selfie-related deaths have become so common that "selficide" has been suggested as a new word to be added to the English dictionary.

While less specifically related to death, the 10th version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) includes Y93.C2 which represents, "Activity, hand held interactive electronic device" and is written about in this blog.



Have fun taking selfies, and remember to be safe.

Presidential and Non-presidential Text Alerts

Yesterday I was in the San Antonio International Airport when suddenly I heard the sound of a loud alert resonate throughout the airport. I didn't realize it at the time, but my phone was producing the sound in concert with hundreds of other phones. This was the reason why:



According to an announcement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a nationwide test of the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) and Emergency Alert System was scheduled for yesterday afternoon. The announcement says, "The WEA system is used to warn the public about dangerous weather, missing children, and other critical situations through alerts on cell phones."

I wonder why this was called a "Presidential Alert" and am guessing that it has to do with our president compensating for his feelings of inadequacy related to relief efforts in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria. It would have been more appropriate to call it a "National Alert" or something similar.

Anyway, did you know that in addition to these national alerting systems, there are local emergency alerting programs too? If you live in Los Angeles, here are a couple that might be of interest:

Alert LA County: https://www.lacounty.gov/emergency/alert-la/
NotifyLA: http://emergency.lacity.org/notifyla

There are local alerting programs in other metropolitan areas too. Try searching Google for "text alert [city]" to learn more. Stay safe and be alert! After all, the world needs more lerts (rimshot).