SMS and voice calls in Mainland China go through a different provider than the rest of the world, and the mechanics are different enough that they’re worth understanding before you set responders up.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.incident.io/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
SMS
Identifying our messages
SMS messages in Mainland China don’t come from a fixed number, so you can’t identify them by sender or save the sender as a contact. Look for the signature prefix at the start of every message — ours is【臻创互联】 (Zhenchuang, our partner in China).
Chinese carriers assign each SMS its own sender number, usually starting 106…, and it can vary from message to message. The contact card on your phone will still match incoming voice calls from us, but SMS messages need to be identified by the signature.
Overnight delivery
SMS delivery overnight can be unreliable in Mainland China. Pair SMS with another method like a voice call for high-urgency rules — as with SMS anywhere, we don’t recommend it as the only high-urgency channel. Chinese carriers apply their own traffic policies overnight and can hold or drop messages they consider non-urgent. We can’t predict or work around this.Voice
Voice calls in Mainland China come from a fixed number, so you can save it as a contact and treat it like any other call. VoIP numbers work too. The iOS and Android contact card setup applies here, including Emergency Bypass on iOS and Do Not Disturb exceptions on Android.Adding a Chinese phone number
Chinese data protection law means we can’t collect personal data — including a phone number — from someone inside Mainland China. So adding a Chinese number to incident.io is a two-step process, and the first step has to happen from outside the country. There are two ways to do it:- Self-serve: the user adds and verifies their number themselves from outside Mainland China — for example, while travelling or visiting another office. Once added, they can use it from anywhere.
- Manager-assisted: a manager adds the number on the user’s behalf from outside Mainland China. The user then verifies it from inside Mainland China using the 事件incidentio app (not the web dashboard).