How ClifF Alert Works

Full guide. Setup, alert codes, reminders, edge cases.

The idea

You set your phone to silent or Do Not Disturb during work, sleep, or focus time. That's good for almost everything except one case: a family emergency where someone really needs to reach you. ClifF Alert fills that gap.

Pick a code word with the people you trust. They text you that code in an emergency. Your phone wakes up, rings loudly through silent mode, and shows the alert. You tap one button to acknowledge it — the alarm stops and a short reply goes back to whoever raised the alert.

Designed for offline operation. ClifF Alert works on cellular signal alone. No internet, no accounts, no cloud servers. If SMS can reach your phone, the alert will fire.

First-time setup

Install and grant permissions

The app needs SMS receive and SMS send, plus permission to show notifications. The onboarding screen explains why each one is needed.

Grant Do Not Disturb access

The single most important step. Without DND access, alerts cannot ring when your phone is on silent. The status card on the home screen will be amber until this is granted — tap it to open the Android settings page.

Add trusted contacts in Settings

Only numbers you add can trigger alerts. Anyone else sending the same code word is ignored. This is a hard guardrail, not a preference.

Share your alert code

Tell your trusted contacts what to send. The default is URGMOM, URGDAD, or URG followed by any word made of letters.

Test it

Press the TEST button on the home screen. The phone should ring loudly and the screen should wake. No message is sent to anyone. Tap “Received, on my way” or wait 30 seconds to stop it. A real alert still needs a text from a number in your trusted list.

Alert codes

An alert is any SMS that:

Comes from a number in your trusted contacts list, AND
Starts with URG followed by a word made of letters (URGMOM, URGDAD, URGSARAH, etc.). Upper or lower case both work.

Both conditions must be true. A trusted contact sending "what time is dinner" does not trigger an alert. A stranger sending "URGMOM" does not trigger an alert.

Secret keywords

You can add secret keywords in Settings. They do not ring the alarm. They raise how urgent a message from a trusted contact looks, and such a message may show an “Elevated urgency” notification. Only a URG code rings the alarm.

The acknowledgement reply

When an alert fires, your phone rings, wakes, and shows a notification with one action button: Received, on my way. Tapping it does two things:

Silences the alarm immediately.
Sends a reply SMS in the format Received, on my way | <your name> | <time>.

Why "Received, on my way"? In an emergency, the person who raised the alert needs one thing first: confirmation that someone heard them. Silence is unbearable. "Received, on my way" is the universal acknowledgement — it answers "are you there?" with the most reassuring possible response, regardless of what you literally do next. Whether you're physically heading over, calling emergency services, or already on the phone with them, the sender knows their alert reached a real human who is now acting. The exact next step gets discussed in the follow-up call or SMS — the acknowledgement just buys those crucial first seconds of relief.

Your location

ClifF Alert does not use your location. It has no location permission and never reads GPS, Wi-Fi or network position. The acknowledgement tells the sender you are coming; it does not say where you are. If you want to share where you are, tell them in the follow-up call or message.

Scheduled reminders (ATTN)

Beyond emergencies, trusted contacts can also schedule timed reminders on your phone. Useful for medication reminders, pickup times, anything you want a loud nudge for.

Format: ATTN-30M take medication or ATTN-10:30 pick up groceries.

Format	Meaning
`ATTN-30M`	Fire reminder in 30 minutes
`ATTN-1H`	Fire reminder in 1 hour
`ATTN-10:30`	Fire reminder at 10:30 today (or tomorrow if past)
`ATTN-CANCEL`	Cancel all pending reminders

The contact gets an SMS back confirming the schedule. When the reminder fires, the phone rings just like an emergency alert — same loud-through-silent treatment. Tap "Done" to dismiss.

Pause vs Force-Stop

Two ways to silence the app temporarily. Only one of them works the way you'd expect.

Use Pause, not Force Stop. Force-stopping the app via Android Settings does not reliably silence it — Android automatically restarts the monitoring service when an SMS arrives, and the alert will fire. The in-app Pause is the only reliable way to silence alerts.

Action	Service running	Alert fires	History logged
Pause (in-app)	Yes	No	Yes (PAUSED)
Force Stop (Android Settings)	Auto-restarts on next SMS	Yes	Yes (normal)
Boot / OS kill	Auto-restarts on boot	Yes	Yes (normal)

This is intentional Android system behaviour — a safety app must not silently miss messages. ClifF Alert is built around that guarantee. To temporarily silence alerts without missing messages, use the Pause button on the home screen.

What the home screen tells you

The signal indicator

The pulsing rings around the dot show the current state:

Green — everything is working. Alerts will fire normally.
Amber — something is degraded. Tap the status card to fix it (usually DND access or SMS permission).
Red — monitoring is paused. SMS messages are being logged but no alerts will fire.

Recent alerts

The last few alerts received are shown on the home screen with timestamp, sender (last 4 digits), and message. Tap "See all" for the full history. Alerts received while paused are logged with a PAUSED badge.

Permissions explained

SMS receive

Required to detect incoming alerts. ClifF Alert is not your SMS app. It does not read your message history, does not access your inbox. Each incoming SMS is checked in memory against your configured patterns, then discarded. No SMS content is ever written to disk.

SMS send

Used in two cases: (1) sending the "Received, on my way" reply when you tap the action button, and (2) sending a confirmation SMS back when a trusted contact schedules an ATTN reminder. Replies go only to the original sender of the alert.

Other system permissions

The app uses standard Android permissions for waking the screen, ringing through silent mode, running in the background, restarting after device reboot, and posting notifications. None of these involve network access. See the privacy policy for the full list.

Common questions

Will this drain my battery?

No. The foreground service idles using almost no CPU. The app makes zero network calls. Expected battery cost: well under 1% per day.

Does it work without internet?

Yes. SMS works on cellular signal alone. If your phone has bars, alerts will reach you. ClifF Alert never touches the internet for anything.

What if my phone is dead or out of signal?

The alert is held by your carrier and delivered when the phone reconnects. At that point ClifF Alert will fire the alarm normally. This is standard SMS behaviour.

Can people I haven't added trigger alerts?

No. Only numbers in your trusted contacts list can fire alerts. Anyone else sending the same code word is silently ignored.

Does it work alongside my normal SMS app?

Yes. ClifF Alert doesn't replace anything. Your normal SMS app keeps working exactly as before. ClifF only listens for the specific URG pattern from trusted contacts.

What happens if I uninstall it?

All data is in the app's private storage, which Android removes on uninstall. Nothing remains on your device, nothing was ever stored elsewhere.