The Personal Safety app on the Google Pixel introduces an important feature

Personal emergencies is an application installed by default on all Google Pixel smartphones and is responsible for providing SOS functions in cases of extreme emergencies, such as during road accidents or dangerous situations in your vicinity.

The 2021.08.27 version in rollout on the Play Store has a new emergency feature, as was discovered by the guys from the Telegram GooglePixels group. Within the general settings of Personal emergencies, it is now possible to customize the behavior of the function after pressing the power button 5 consecutive times. Users can choose whether to initiate a call to local emergency services, share their location, remaining battery level or start a video recording in real-time.

The video in question, whose total length allowed is 45 minutes, has a weight of about 10 MB for each minute of recording thanks to particular compression algorithms. The boys XDA have tried the function discovering that a video of 44 seconds has a weight of 13.5 MB, at a bit rate of 2.5 Mbps and 720p resolution. All recorded videos are uploaded to the cloud, on your Google account, and possibly can be automatically shared to your emergency contacts.

As soon as the SOS function is activated – the user has 5 seconds to disable it -, the phone interface changes highlighting some quick commands and the camera interface to start recording a video with the front camera or rear. As soon as the video is stopped, the user has 15 seconds to decide whether to automatically send it to their emergency contacts or not. All videos are uploaded and stored on the Google cloud for 7 days and eventually deleted; the user can also share the link to the video file.

Today’s update extends the features already offered by Android 12’s SOS mode; interested users can download the update from the Play Store badge below or from this APK Mirror link.

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