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Alarm Sound from the App when Alarm is Triggered
Spent a long time in the chat box with a SimpliSafe tech yesterday inquiring about features. One of the things I learned is that the SimpliSafe app, at least under Apple's iOS, uses system notifications to communicate an alarm trigger. The notifications are easily ignored or missed all together because they are indistinguishable from any other system notification, and because the noise they make is not very loud. I learned this the hard way when my Abode alarm system triggered while I was driving on the freeway. I couldn't hear the notification, and since I was driving, I wasn't watching the phone screen. I found out two hours later that the trigger was a false alarm, and since the monitoring service was unable to reach me (out of cell phone range), they dispatched law enforcement. The county sheriff gives us three false alarms a year, then we're fined $150 for any additional. To their credit, the Abode team modified their app to play a very loud sound file when an alarm is triggered.
Yesterday when I started poking around in this forum to see if others had noticed this problem, I learned that SimpliSafe has known about this critical shortcoming for at least a year. Yet the tech I chatted with acted like it was an unknown issue, and could only offer to pass it along to the developers as a new feature request.
Since SimpliSafe seems to be ignoring the problem, I'm asking forum participants to contact SimpliSafe and let them know they want a loud alarm sound from the SimpliSafe app. Here's a link to the SimpliSafe contact page. You can chat or phone; I did both yesterday. SimpliSafe also has a web page for requesting a new feature. I used that yesterday, too.
Maybe if enough of us make enough noise, SimpliSafe will modify the app so that it makes enough noise, too!
emily_s
Community Admin
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3.3K Messages
1 year ago
@Black_n_White Thank you for this suggestion! I have forwarded this request to our dev team for their consideration. Once I hear any news from them, an update will be provided in this thread.
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jhdepoiii
4 Messages
1 year ago
First of all, I think it's already better than the 2.5x more expensive ADT equipment I bought several years ago because I don't even think the app makes a sound when the alarm goes off. It just gives me a notification and that's it. At least SS sent a notification AND a sound. But it does this only once. That makes no sense to me.
The alarm on the control center sounds for up to 8 minutes and yet my phone will only make a sound once. So I better hope I have my phone with me a the moment the alarm goes off, or else remember to always look at my phone if I've been away from it.
Perhaps it is a limitation of the phone's OS and notification system, but the app should continue to send a sound notification for as long as the alarm is going off or until I interact with the app, whichever is first.
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amajor
3 Messages
1 year ago
Thank you for this post. I just switched to an iPhone from Android and this is a HUGE issue for me with the iPhone. I already missed critical camera motion notification because simplisafe has not built custom notifications into their app and the iPhone tone is too meek.
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