Quick links
📱Download our mobile app
If you'd like the best possible experience as a responder, download our mobile app here.
When you are paged, we'll try and contact you according to your notification rules.
By default, assuming you've enabled them, this will include:
Push notification
Phone call
SMS
Email
Slack direct message
For both push notifications, phone calls and SMS messages, there are steps you can take to ensure you get notified, regardless of what your phone's silent mode and do-not-disturb settings are set up like.
iOS
Phone calls + SMS
Save the incident.io contact card to your contacts.
Go into the Contacts app and open the contact you've just saved.
Tap on
Editat the top and scroll down toRingtoneEnable the
Emergency Bypasstoggle, which will allow calls and messages from incident.io to make a noise regardless of your silent or Focus settings.Finally, we'd recommend opening your preferences on the incident.io dashboard on your computer and clicking the test button next to your phone number whilst your phone is locked to verify the bypass is working. We'd recommend trying:
While your phone is on silent
While your phone is in do-not-disturb
While your phone is in sleep mode
If you've done the above, and your phone is still in silent, first check that the phone call you received was identified with the incident.io contact details. If it wasn't, you might need to re-save the incident.io contact card.
If you haven't been phoned at all then please get in touch with support. If you have been phone, but it didn't make any noise, then please get in touch with our support team.
Push notifications
iOS has a concept of Critical notifications, which are push notifications that'll make a noise, regardless of whether your phone is on silent, or if you are in sleep/do-not-disturb. The incident.io app supports these natively so as long as you agreed to these notifications during set up of the app, you'll receive them. If you did not agree to them, you'll see a warning on the home screen of the app.
To enable these notifications, open the Settings app on your phone, scroll down to incident.io, select Notifications and then enable critical notifications.
Custom notification sounds
For push notifications, you can pick a custom notification sound from Notifications > Notification sounds. If you want the notification to make a sound for a long time, we have notification sounds ranging from 1 second to 2 minutes long.
Android
Phone calls + SMS
Save the incident.io contact card to your contacts.
Open the Contacts app and find the contact you've just saved.
Favourite the contact by tapping on the star icon ⭐
Open the Settings app and search for Do Not Disturb
Tap on People and then for both Message and Calls, ensure that Starred contacts can interrupt your Do Not Disturb.
Please note that Android's "interrupting Do Not Disturb" setting for a contact only refers to whether calls and SMS are displayed while in Do Not Disturb. It does not bypass your mute switch or volume settings.
Push notifications
When you receive a push notification on Android, incident.io will try to make it audible regardless of whether your phone is on silent or not.
To ensure that you receive push notifications, we recommend enabling the "Do Not Disturb access" permission when prompted during onboarding.
If you've installed the app in a work profile, Android will not let you allow this permission. In these cases, we will try and play a noise using your alarm volume stream as a fallback.
However, if you'd rather use the mute switch bypass in a work profile, there's a workaround available. Install incident.io in a personal profile and grant Do Not Disturb access to the app in that profile (there's no need to sign in on the personal profile). This should allow the work profile to get that permission as well.
How does this work?
When you receive a critical notification, provided we have Do Not Disturb access, we'll temporarily unmute your phone and then send the notification. We'll re-mute your phone 60 seconds later. If we don't have Do Not Disturb access, we'll fall back to playing the sound using your alarm volume.
Please note that if your phone was previously on silent, rather than reverting it back to silent, incident.io will be revert it to vibrate. This is due to an unfortunate bug in Android where incident.io cannot set your phone back to silent, as the system will inadvertently enable Do Not Disturb, even though the app never asks it to. To avoid this, we revert your phone to vibrate rather than silent.
Please note that unmuting your device only applies to push notifications - incident.io has no access to your system mute switch or volume when SMS and phone calls are received.
You may audibly hear phone calls and SMS, whilst on silent, if they are received within 60s of the push notification being received, as the incident.io app unmutes your phone for 60s upon receiving that notification. However, we offer no guarantees for SMS and phone calls ringing - Android does not offer a way for the incident.io app to temporarily unmute your phone specifically for those usecases.
If you're not receiving notifications in certain cases, you can also try the following:
Disable Pause app activity if unused. By default, Android typically will allow the incident.io app to be paused if the app is unused - which may be typical if you're not on-call very often. You can find this by opening the Settings app, tapping on Applications, incident.io and then scrolling down to find the toggle at the bottom.
Enabling Unrestricted battery usage. By default, Android will enable "Optimized" battery usage for the incident.io app. We don't perform any background work that should drain your battery, other than receiving push notifications and updating your volume temporarily, which should have little affect on your battery. You can find this by opening the Settings app, tapping on Applications, incident.io, App battery usage, and then enabling Unrestricted.
Please note that if using a OnePlus device which has a physical mute switch, we cannot guarantee that push notifications will play a sound, whether that's in do not disturb or not. This is due to OnePlus limitations. We recommend leaving your OnePlus in "Ring" for notifications to work both in Do Not Disturb and normal mode.
Custom notification sounds
You can customise sounds for each notification channel through your device settings from ringtones installed on your phone. To do this, head to the mobile app. In your personal preferences, under "Notifications" you can click on each notification channel to customise the sound through your device settings.
We do not install our own custom notification sounds on Android devices, for now!