The game logs seem like a big deal to me. What do these logs really tell us about his actual use of the game during the drive? Do they actually show he was actively playing the game during the drive?
Here's some of the info from the Cell Phone Records and Data Recovery Factual Report that might answer some of your questions.
"In the 12 hours preceding the crash, the highest data usage was recorded in the minutes immediately leading up to the crash - a rate of 204 KB/minute. This level of data activity is consistent with online game activity. When the phone was not in use during the overnight hours when the Tesla driver was asleep, the average data usage was less than 1 KB/minute."
"Because the device was an Apple-owned development fused model, after the iPhone was powered on, Apple was able to recover certain diagnostic logs that it located on the device."
"The diagnostic logs that were able to be recovered consisted of unencrypted cell phone application CrashReporter logs. CrashReporter logs are available to application developers for diagnostic purposes. When an application on a phone crashes, an application crash report is created and stored on the device. Application Crash reports generally describe the conditions under which the application terminated and contain a limited amount of information that can be used for a timeline analysis."
"On Friday, March 23, 2018, the following logs were dropped on the Tesla driver’s iPhone 8 Plus:
9:06:50 a.m.: A jetsam log was dropped that
showed process “sgz” to be the application in use and in the foreground of the phone. The process was running for approximately 6 minutes prior to the log being dropped because of excessive memory use.
9:10:25 a.m.: A wakeups resource log was dropped that
showed process “sgz” to be extremely active for a 5-minute window. The log was dropped due to excessive power usage.
9:49:51 a.m.: A jetsam log was dropped that showed process “sgz” to be foreground visible on the phone. This log was dropped because process “com.apple.siri.embeddedspeech” exceeded its memory limit while holding an active transaction. This means that Siri was engaged and listening for audio. The log also shows that Siri was launched about 2 minutes and 43 seconds prior to this log being dropped at about 9:47:8 a.m. Apple advised NTSB that Siri could have been engaged by someone holding the home button, or a damaged button could have kept Siri engaged and listening from 9:47:8 to 9:49:51 a.m."
For the full 9-page report:
https://dms.ntsb.gov/public/62500-62999/62693/632606.pdf
For timeline (from Human Performance Factors Factual Report):
"Friday, March 23, 2018
7:00 – 7:15 a.m. Awakes -- Family interview
8:46 a.m. Departs home to transport son to preschool -- Carlog data
8:53 a.m. Arrives at preschool in Foster City-- Carlog data
8:59 a.m. Departs preschool to drive to work in Sunnyvale-- Carlog data
9:27 a.m. Crash – Mountain View, CA-- Carlog data"
"The records did show evidence of data transmissions occurring while the vehicle was in motion. One data transmission showed a connection time of 9:26:48 – less than a minute before the crash (see Figure 2). In the 12 hours preceding the crash, the highest data usage (204 kilobytes per minute) was recorded during the 11 1⁄2 minutes immediately preceding the accident."
In one of the reports there was witness testimony from someone at the scene who saw the phone damaged on the ground who picked it up (think they said it was ringing, but didn't answer it) but then set it back down. Believe this corresponds to around the time the spouse was trying to reach him.
For all the NTSB reports to date:
Accident ID HWY18FH011 Mode Highway occurred on March 23, 2018 in Mountain View, CA USA Last Modified on February 12, 2020 11:02 Public Released on September 09, 2019 13:09 Total 58 document items