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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 — Critical Alerts aren’t available in the 事件incidentio app, so push notifications can’t bypass silent mode.
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
  • WhatsApp 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

To receive phone calls and SMS that bypass silent mode and Do Not Disturb, add the incident.io contact to your phone and turn on Emergency Bypass for it.

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Add the incident.io contact

Open the incident.io app and go to Settings → Contacts. Step 1 offers one way to add our contact, depending on your iOS version:
  • iOS 26 and later: tap Add incident.io contact. iOS adds the incident.io On-call contact and keeps it in sync, and we never get access to your contacts.
  • iOS 18 and earlier: tap Provide contacts access. We create the incident.io On-call contact and keep it up to date. We only change our own card, and your contacts never leave your phone. When iOS asks, choose to share all contacts: with only selected contacts, we can’t find and update our card.
If you’d rather not, tap Save our contact card to save a copy yourself. A saved copy won’t update when our numbers change, so the app may ask you to save it again. The app also walks you through this step when you first sign in.

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Turn on Emergency Bypass

  1. Open the Contacts app and tap Lists in the top-left corner
  2. Select All Contacts. Don’t use the “incident.io” list (see note below)
  3. Find and open the incident.io On-call contact
  4. Tap Edit, then tap Ringtone
  5. Enable Emergency Bypass so calls ring even when your phone is silenced
  6. Repeat for Text Tone if you want SMS alerts to bypass silent mode
  7. Tap Done to save
The Contacts settings in the incident.io app list the same steps.
Note for iOS 18+ users: You may see an “incident.io” section in your Contacts app. There’s a known Apple bug where editing contacts from this section causes the screen to become stuck. Always edit from “All Contacts” instead. We’ve reported this to Apple.
Four iOS screens: All Contacts, the incident.io On-call card, Ringtone, and Emergency Bypass switched on Testing: Send yourself a test notification from your incident.io dashboard while your device is locked and silenced to confirm calls come through.
No Edit button? Open another contact in the Contacts app, then return to the incident.io On-call contact. The Edit button may then show up.

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Call screening

iOS can screen calls from unknown numbers before they reach you, using features like Screen Unknown Callers and Silence Unknown Callers. When these are on, an on-call phone call from an unknown number may be intercepted, sent to voicemail, or answered by an automated screening assistant instead of ringing your phone. This causes two problems for on-call:
  • You might miss the call entirely, because it never rings through to you.
  • The screening assistant can interact with our call and register a keypress, which we may record as you acknowledging the escalation even though you never picked up.
We can’t change how iOS call screening answers calls. The fix is to make sure our number counts as a known contact so screening lets it straight through:
  1. Save the incident.io contact card and enable Emergency Bypass, following the steps above.
  2. Confirm the incident.io On-call number is saved in your Contacts. Screening applies to unknown numbers, so a saved contact won’t be screened.
  3. Send yourself a test page while your device is locked to confirm the call rings through as expected.
If you rely on iOS call screening, you must have the incident.io contact card saved. Without it, screening can silence our calls or auto-answer them, and an auto-answered call can be misrecorded as an acknowledgement.

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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.
Please note that the following settings in iOS could interfere with push notifications:Announcing notifications: if you have toggled “Announce notifications” in your incident.io app settings, sounds might go through connected AirPods or other devices when your device is locked.Screen Time: if you have a time limit set on your device, iOS might not deliver notifications correctly. Consider adding the incident.io app to your list of “Always on” apps.
Apple Watch If you have an Apple Watch paired with your iPhone, notifications are delivered to your watch by default when it’s on your wrist and your iPhone is locked. This means your iPhone won’t make a sound — the notification goes to your watch instead. If you’d prefer to always receive incident.io notifications on your iPhone, open the Watch app on your iPhone, tap Notifications, find incident.io in the list, and select Off. This will stop notifications from being mirrored to your watch, so they’ll always play on your phone. Connected headphones or earbuds (such as AirPods or other Bluetooth audio devices) can also affect where notification sounds are routed. If you have “Announce Notifications” enabled, sounds may play through your AirPods instead of your phone’s speaker when your device is locked. 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.

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WhatsApp

You can receive escalations as WhatsApp messages, and acknowledge or mark yourself as not available straight from the buttons in the message. We support WhatsApp messages only, not calls. To make sure your pages come through, allow the WhatsApp app to override Do Not Disturb: head to Settings → Focus → Do Not Disturb, tap Apps under Allowed Notifications, and add WhatsApp.