What Are Push Notifications?

First, some context is useful. Because of the high value that we all put on using smartphones for communication, both Apple and Google have worked very hard on making sending messages a secure, reliable, fast, power efficient and engaging experience on a smartphone, improving on the previous generation of notifications (SMS or text messages) in many ways.

Smart24 makes use of push (or 'remote') notifications to alert you about important new information from your monitoring team.

It also makes use of 'local' notifications where the Smart24 app senses some change, or schedules some kind of event, that you need to know about and perhaps act on.

To receive both push and local notifications, you need to give Smart24 permission in your settings. Doing so creates a kind of secure and verified link between you, Apple/Google servers (depending on your operating system) and the Grid monitoring platform.

When your monitoring team want to 'push' a notification (often a short message) to you, then behind the scenes, the Grid sends that information to Apple/Google push servers located around the world, who then handle the final delivery of the notification to your smartphone in a secure and fast way. They also hold on to the notification in the event they cannot deliver it to you first time, and then automatically try to resend it later.

End to end encryption is used, which means that Apple or Google can't read your messages even if they wanted to or were told to.

Notifications can be delivered to you, even if your Smart24 app is not currently running. Tapping or swiping a notification that you receive, for instance on your phone's lock screen, will always bring you straight back into the app.

They are also delivered to you as soon as your phone connects to the internet, after a period of being 'offline' or switched off.

At this time, we don't require that you give permission to receive notifications. However it is strongly recommended because of the overall importance of time-sensitive collaboration between you and your monitoring team.