Do Not Disturb override
Everything below rests on one rule: a channel asks, and the phone decides. What arrives is guaranteed; how loudly it arrives is not, and any page that told you otherwise was selling.
Three rungs, and each one costs something
Normal is a notification in the shade and needs no permission at all. Important is a heads-up banner with a sound, if the subscriber allowed this channel that. Urgent may take over the screen, override Do Not Disturb and be read aloud — each granted separately, each refusable. The rung is a ceiling rather than an outcome, and it is also a budget: a channel that spends Urgent on a car-park closure loses the permission the same afternoon, from the only people who could have granted it.
A channel asks. The phone decides.
Every channel declares what it would like to be able to do: make a sound, show a banner, override Do Not Disturb, take over the screen, speak the text aloud. Each subscriber grants those one at a time, on their own handset, and can take any of them back later without unsubscribing. Nothing a channel asks for is granted by asking. The loudest thing an unpermitted channel can achieve is an ordinary notification — which still arrives, and still says what you wrote.
Questions, answered plainly
When should I use urgent priority?
When somebody needs to act in the next few minutes: an evacuation, a lockdown, a genuine safety instruction. Not for a schedule change, and not for anything that would still be fine to read an hour later. Urgent is granted by subscribers one at a time and withdrawn just as easily, so it behaves like a budget rather than a setting.
Can you guarantee my alert will make a sound?
No, and nobody honestly can. Whether it makes a sound is decided on the handset by what that subscriber granted your channel and by their own settings. What we guarantee is that the alert reaches every subscribed device. Any service promising more is either wrong or is describing a carrier cell broadcast, which is a different thing entirely.
Do subscribers need an account?
No. They install the app, subscribe to a handle, and that is the whole of it. Only the person running the channel signs up for anything.
How do people find my channel?
From the handle you give them: on a poster, in an enrolment email, on a QR code, in a footer. Public channels also appear in the app’s discover list. Sealed ones appear nowhere at all, by design.
Say it once. Every subscribed phone gets it.
Free up to 100 subscribers, no card to start, and the handle is yours permanently.
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