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Download our mobile appIf you’d like the best possible experience as a responder, download our mobile app here.
For responders in Mainland China, see Mobile app in China — there’s a separate 事件incidentio app distributed through Chinese app stores, and the incident.io app won’t reliably deliver notifications inside the country.
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 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.

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Phone calls + SMS

  1. Save the incident.io contact card to your contacts.
  2. Open the Contacts app and find the contact you’ve just saved.
  3. Favorite the contact by tapping on the star icon
  4. Open the Settings app and search for Do Not Disturb
  5. If you have Do Not Disturb enabled, make sure you go under Exceptions > Calls and/or Messages and ensure you allow DND exceptions for Favorite contacts only (this should have been done in step 3)
Depending on your Android version, you may need to 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.

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Push notifications

When you receive a critical push notification on Android, incident.io plays the sound through your phone’s alarm audio stream and shows a full-screen alert when your screen is off or locked — similar to how an alarm app behaves. This makes pages audible regardless of whether your phone is on silent or in Do Not Disturb. How it behaves
  • We play the sound through the alarm stream, using a notification channel called “High priority notifications (Alarm style)”.
  • When your phone screen is off, or your phone is locked, we display the notification using a “Full screen intent” — similar to how an alarm appears.
  • When your phone screen is on, we show a heads-up notification through the same alarm channel.
  • The sound plays at your alarm stream volume.
Make sure pages are always audible
  • Set your alarm stream volume to a high value.
  • Make sure alarms are allowed through Do Not Disturb. This is usually on by default, but if you have custom Do Not Disturb modes (e.g. Work, Sleep) you may need to allow alarms in each one.
Permissions For full-screen alerts to display, the app needs the Display over other apps / Full-screen intent permission. This is typically granted automatically when you install the app. If you’ve revoked it, pages will still ring but won’t show the full-screen alert — open the app to re-grant it. Pages ring through the alarm audio stream, which bypasses Do Not Disturb modes by default — no app permissions required for that. We do still recommend granting Do Not Disturb access (called Modes access on Android 14 and newer). When granted, we use it to make pages louder and harder to miss:
  • Boosting your alarm stream volume to the level you’ve configured in the app, if needed.
  • If you have Do Not Disturb set to a mode that explicitly blocks alarms (e.g. Total silence), temporarily disabling it so the page can ring.
  • If your phone is on silent or vibrate, temporarily switching it to normal ringer mode so the page is audible.
All of these are temporary. We run a background task to restore your previous state around 60 seconds later. This is best-effort — the system may occasionally end the task early. We also strongly recommend checking these settings:
  1. 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.
  2. 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. You can find this by opening the Settings app, tapping on Applications, incident.io, App battery usage, and then enabling Unrestricted.
Work profiles The full-screen intent permission works inside work profiles, so push notifications behave the same way as on a personal profile. Work profiles can’t be granted Do Not Disturb / Modes access. If this matters to you, there’s a workaround: install incident.io in a personal profile too and grant Do Not Disturb access in that profile (you don’t need to sign in). The work profile inherits the permission. Device limitations
  • 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.
  • Some Samsung devices have a feature called Focus modes which can add additional rules to your do-not-disturb settings. If you’re not receiving notifications whilst in a Focus mode (such as “Work”) then you need to edit the Do Not Disturb settings for the Focus mode specifically and whitelist incident.io in the Allowed Apps section.
Smartwatches and connected devices If you have a smartwatch (such as a Pixel Watch or Galaxy Watch) paired with your phone, it may interfere with notification sounds on your phone. By default, many smartwatches mute notification sounds on your phone when the watch is connected, so that you only hear them on your wrist. For Pixel Watch: Open the Pixel Watch app on your phone, go to Notifications > Mute notifications, and toggle off “Mute notifications” in the Phone section. This will allow notification sounds to play on your phone even while your watch is connected. For other Wear OS watches: Open the Wear OS app on your phone, go to Settings > Notifications, and disable Silence phone while wearing watch. Connected headphones or earbuds (such as Pixel Buds or other Bluetooth audio devices) can also affect where notification sounds are routed. If you’re not hearing notifications, check that your audio isn’t being routed to a connected Bluetooth device. Custom notification sounds You can customize 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 customize the sound through your device settings. Repeat notification sound In your notification preferences, you can enable repeating notification sounds so that pages continue to ring until you interact with them. Acknowledging from a notification If you’re using an Android device with a VPN, such as Google VPN, and you’re seeing errors trying to quick-ack from a notification, it might be due to your VPN settings. You can add an opt-out of our app in your VPN in order for this to work.