Google told the BBC it’s up to manufacturers to decide how and when the emergency SOS feature works, even though Google is the one that developed it.
Corporate bullshit 101
No surprise from a company that announce to their employee they are fired by disabling their pass.
It is up to the device manufacturer. Google develops Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and the Google apps and services (Google Play Store for example). This feature (afaik) is in AOSP.
Google developed the version in AOSP, which is open source. Device manufacturers are then able to change the code as needed. If a device manufacturer uses base AOSP with (nearly) no changes, the fix Google made will be applied when the AOSP update goes through the manufacturers build pipeline and to the device (on Google Pixel phones for example). For manufacturers that have a lot of changes compared to AOSP (Xiaomi, Samsung, and many more), they might have to create their own fix that works on their own version of Android, which takes a lot longer.
One of the reasons people run “Custom ROMs” on their Android phone is to be responsible themselves for updates and fixes instead of the device manufacturer.
