The alert gets through
Our first product. Reach checks that a medical alert reaches the person, on every iOS release, on real devices.
Your reading needs attention
Sounds through Focus and the silent switch.
An example run. Reach will test every condition on real devices, for your app, on every iOS build.
Phones are built to stay quiet.
Focus, deep sleep, earbuds, an update: any one can silence an alarm. In February 2025 the FDA warned that missed smartphone alerts from diabetes devices may have contributed to serious harm, including death.
The duty to test alert delivery does not end at clearance. It restarts with every release.
A record for what actually happened.
Five stages stand between an alert and a person. Reach writes down each one it can show, and says plainly which it cannot.
effective_at_msThe moment the condition changed. A check that runs late keeps the earlier time.
observed_at_msWhen the phone processed it. The gap between the two is never passed off as delivery time.
Every run, open to inspection.
The Workbench shows an engineer what ran, what happened and what changed. Every decision links back to the lines of code that made it.
- Investigate
- One episode, every decision, each traced to its source.
- Compare
- Two runs side by side, field by field, each on its own clock.
- Learn
- A guide to the whole alert path, from the condition to the record.
Running today: the engine, its notification policy and the Workbench.Next: more phones, Critical Alerts, Bluetooth and background.
| Condition | What can go silent | What it records |
|---|---|---|
| Focus & Do Not DisturbEvery Focus mode, with and without the Critical Alerts entitlement. | Banner suppressed, sound muted. The entitlement should break through. On this build, does it? | Delivery per Focus mode and entitlement state, with the OS build. |
| Deep sleep & backgroundApp suspended, terminated, in Low Power Mode, overnight. | The app never wakes, so nothing sounds at 3 a.m. | Time from event to sound, app state at the time, what happened on relaunch. |
| Permissions & resetsNotification permission revoked, re-granted, or reset by an update. | The app believes it can alert. It cannot. | What the app noticed, and what it told the person, per state. |
| Accessories & volumeCar audio, earbuds, hearing aids, a speaker in the kitchen. | The sound goes somewhere else, or nowhere, at four percent. | Where the audio routed, at what level, whether the phone itself sounded. |
| Bluetooth reconnectionSensor out of range and back, phone rebooted, watch in between. | A silent gap between the last reading and the first alert. | Time to first reading and time to first alert, per path. |
| OS betas & updatesEvery iOS and watchOS beta, from the first seed. | What changed on Tuesday, in your users’ pockets on Wednesday. | A regression table per beta, published before it ships. |
| Time-sensitive vs criticalWhich interruption level each alert uses. | A critical alert demoted to a banner nobody hears. | Entitlement honoured or not, per alert, per OS build. |
| Delivery receiptsDelivered, displayed, acknowledged. | “Sent” was never the question. | A timestamp for each state, in a form you can put in the file. |
| Run on current and previous iPhone and Watch generations. Every line names the device and the build. | ||
A decade of medical alerts.
Ten years on the alerts that have to wake people, through Focus, the silent switch and a phone asleep for hours. Reach starts from what that taught us.
The film of it
| IEC 62304 | SOUP records, every release. Identification, version, known anomalies evaluated against your hazards, a change notice before every release and a defect notice when one is found. |
|---|---|
| IEC 60601-1-8 | Applicability table. Which alarm-system clauses a phone can meet, which it cannot, and why. An argument your risk file can cite. |
| Section 524B | SBOM in CycloneDX or SPDX. Support status and end-of-support dates per component, a vulnerability notice inside thirty days. |
| Known anomalies | The list nobody wants to write. Written. What Reach cannot guarantee on which OS, stated plainly. |
Reach is software for manufacturers. It makes no medical claim of its own. The manufacturer’s clearance covers the system, and Reach is documented so that it can.
Supplier facts, for your quality teamAndroid?+
iOS and watchOS first, because that is where the Critical Alerts entitlement lives and where our decade is. Android follows the same matrix in 2027.
What about the clients you built alerts for?+
Client work stays with the client. Reach is built clean-room, from public standards and our own test devices. If there is a conflict of interest, we turn the work down.
Can you help with our alerts before then?+
Yes. That is the work we have done for ten years, and it is a project like any other. Start one.