Oh, right, safe phones for situations such as domestic abuse. I wasn't sure what they meant, and in the confusion I started wondering about whether the alert would trigger those phone-detonated bombs you see in spy films.
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2026
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Which then reminds me of that fire drill in school where a teacher left the stove on, leading to an actual fire alarm (no damage)
What are they getting us prepared for ?
Receiving emergency warnings.
Atom bombs ?
Natural disasters
Sadly we really don't know that's all.
Look, I volunteer to respond to natural disasters. This will be very useful. Don't confuse preparedness for tragedy for planning to enact atrocities. You undermine the trust in systems that are absolutely necessary in times of great need.
Yeah sorry but where did I say that our government is "planning to enact atrocities" ?
All I'm saying in a tongue in cheek kinda way ( but half on the fence because the way the world goes at times ) is that "we" really don't know.
But in a very serious tone, I fully appreciate what you do and I'm glad we have a system in place. Using tech for good is a wonderful thing. Respect to you.
The emergency alert should be:
"MUUUUUuuuuUUUUM! Where's my footy shorts? I looked everywhere and can't find them!"
I wonder if I will get the alert on GrapheneOS.
I don't see why they need to send out a test to every person at all
To… test that it works?
A similar system in Britain had a national test, but one major network had configured it wrong so most of their 11 million customers didn’t get the message. Previous regional testing had failed to catch the issue because of small sample sizes.
It also publicises the system, and allows people to experience the alert sound and message, which increases confidence in the system.
Yeah but as a programmer there's two things you're testing here
- Does it send the alert correctly to everyone
- Does it do all the correct things (sounds etc)
You don't need to do both at the same time. You could put it on mute or something when sending out the test to everyone. As it said in the article there's people who will be negatively affected by the sound, and they kind of just glossed over it.
As an infrastructure dude, I would definitely want to know about edge cases where what I think of as "TELL EVERYONE" does not in fact, tell everyone.
"There's a tsunami coming. Alert every phone tower within 2 km of shore!"
[Emergency alert sent]
"Hey, it turns out that iOS 18 and earlier devices aren't compatible with alerts in this format."
So, 12% of iPhone users in the critical zone miss out on the tsunami alert.
Even if one specific phone model doesn't work right, what would you actually do about it? Email Apple support and ask politely for them to fix it? What if it's an older model they don't support anymore?
If even 1 person dies because of this, was it worth it for a slightly more thorough test?
It was an example, but what you do in this situation is update the alert deployment process to cater to the failed devices (and it wouldn't likely be as simple as 'these iphones', rather a combination of factors). Focus testing on the specific scenarios/devices that were previously incompatible. There's a point where you're talking about 0.4% of devices, and you'd note that on some risk registry somewhere.
I don't know the acceptable thresholds, but I would expect that if 99% of the population receive the emergency alert, they can give the other 1% a heads-up. Then again, those acceptable thresholds might be 99.9% for all I know.
Either way, sample testing the assortment of phones you have in the lab will only take you so far. At some point you want to trial a full alert to find anything you may have missed.
Does that really solve the problem though? If they want to make sure sound works even if they do a regional test there will still be people negatively affected.
Do the sound test to 5 people
Do the soundless test to everyone else
It's also to make people aware of what an alert would sound/look like
I'd kind of get of it was mesh based, in case you need to get alarms out when i.e power is down.
Have no idea how it actually works, though.