Documentation

The OutagePing app is free. Installed on any Android phone, it detects the moment mains power fails and raises the alarm on that phone — a quiet popup first, then a loud siren that overrides silent mode. It keeps a history on the device. No account is required for any of that.

Pro adds the part the phone can't do alone: our servers wake the people you choose — in their own copy of OutagePing, on whatever phone they are carrying, at alarm volume. They keep doing it even if the monitoring phone loses signal or its battery dies mid-outage (the dead-man's switch). Pro also gives you the web portal and up to 3 monitored phones.

Put simply: the free app wakes whoever is in the building. Pro reaches whoever isn't.

1. Install. Get OutagePing free from Google Play on the phone you'll leave plugged in, and choose This phone stays here when it asks what the phone is for. Grant notifications, and allow it to ignore battery optimization so Android doesn't suspend it.
2. Connect it (Pro only). Open Cloud account in the app and sign in with your OutagePing email — we'll send a 6-digit code. This links the phone to your account so the cloud can wake the people watching it. Skip this and the app still works as a local alarm.
3. Arm it. Plug the phone into a wall socket — not a switched power strip — and tap ARM. That's it; leave it there.

The app watches whether the charger is supplying power, not whether the battery is charging — so it still detects an outage at 100% battery.

The app does two jobs, and a given phone only ever does one of them — so the first time you open it, it asks which this phone is. The handset taped to a charger behind the fridge is monitoring; the phone in your pocket that should go off when your mother's flat loses power is watching.

The answer decides which screen the app opens on, which permissions it asks for, and which settings it shows. A watcher is never asked for charger permissions it will never use, and never shown escalation timings that belong to somebody else's phone. Change it any time under Settings → What this phone does — nothing is lost, and the same account can own a monitored phone and watch someone else's from a different handset.

Alerting works in pairs. One phone sits where the power is; other people are told about it in their own copy of OutagePing, on whatever phone they carry. We call them watchers, and setting one up takes about half a minute.

1. They install the free app. There is nothing to sign up for — no email, no password, no code of their own to wait for.
2. On the monitoring phone: Cloud account → Who's watching → Add someone. Name who it is for, and you get six digits — copy them, or hit Send to pass them on however you already talk.
3. They open the app, choose This phone comes with me on first run, and type the code in. That is the whole setup. It works once and expires in 30 minutes.

Why this and not a text message. A text arrives at the mercy of the receiving phone's silent mode, and power cuts happen at 3am more often than at noon. An OutagePing alert comes through on the alarm channel and can sound through Do Not Disturb — it is built to wake someone, which is the whole job. It also costs nothing per alert, so there is no monthly allowance to exhaust on a bad night, and the person woken can open the app to see whether the phone is still reporting instead of being left with one message and no way to check.

What a watcher can see. Whether that phone has power, whether it is checking in, and its record of past failures — nothing about your other phones, your account, or who else you alert. No phone numbers change hands in either direction. Either of you can end it: you from Who's watching, they from their own list. One phone can have any number of watchers; one watcher can follow up to three phones.

One thing worth checking: someone can be on your list and still be unreachable, if their app was never allowed to show notifications. Both the app and the portal mark those people in amber, so you can see at a glance which of your watchers would actually wake up.

Sign in at outageping.com/account to see whether you're actually protected right now. It has two halves, kept deliberately apart: Your phones, the ones you own and configure, and Shared with you, phones other people set up and gave you a code for.

Each of your phones lists who's watching it, by the name you gave when you made their code, with anyone whose app can't receive alerts marked in amber. That is also where you take somebody's access away.

History is its own tab: every power failure, at your places and the ones shared with you, grouped by month with a rail down the side to jump between them. Each is laid out as what actually happened, in order — when the power failed and whether the phone told us or we worked it out from its silence, whether anyone was standing next to the siren, when the people watching were woken and whether it landed, and how it ended. Plan holds your subscription and account deletion.

Web sign-in uses your email and password (or Google). The monitoring app uses a 6-digit email code instead, so you never need your password on a phone you leave somewhere. A watcher needs neither.

During a real blackout your home Wi-Fi router loses power too — so a phone on Wi-Fi can't reach the cloud. Cell towers have backup power, so a phone with a mobile-data SIM can still send its outage report and heartbeats. A cheap prepaid data SIM is the single biggest reliability upgrade you can make.

Even without one, the dead-man's switch covers you: when the phone stops checking in mid-blackout, our servers notice the silence and alert everyone watching anyway. The wording is slightly softer in that case, because we're inferring the outage rather than being told about it.

It is slower, and the difference is worth knowing. If the phone can reach us it reports the failure itself, and your watchers are alerted on the Stage 3 timer — about 3 minutes by default. If it can't, the only signal we have is the check-ins stopping, and silence takes time to become meaningful: your phone checks in every 5 minutes, we wait for 15 minutes of it before calling an outage, then hold a further 2 minutes in case it was a passing blip. That puts the alert roughly 17 to 23 minutes after the power failed, depending on how recently the last check-in landed.

Both paths end with your people being woken. Only one of them is quick — which is the real argument for the SIM.

Aggressive battery managers can suspend background apps. Allow OutagePing to run unrestricted:

• Samsung: Battery → Background usage limits → remove OutagePing from "Sleeping apps"; allow background activity.
• Xiaomi/MIUI: Security → Permissions → Autostart → enable OutagePing; battery saver → No restrictions.
• Huawei: Apps → OutagePing → Battery → allow Auto-launch and Run in background.
• Oppo/Realme: Battery → allow background running; disable sleep-standby optimization for OutagePing.

Also disable any "battery protection" or "bypass charging" feature. These stop charging at ~80% to preserve battery health, and some manufacturers implement them in a way that makes Android report the charger as unplugged — which looks exactly like a power cut.

Stage 1 (once the power has stayed off long enough to not be a flicker): a quiet popup on the phone with a STOP button. Stage 2 (default +30s): a loud full-screen alarm that overrides silent mode. Stage 3 (default +3 min, Pro): our servers alert everyone watching this phone, on their own phones wherever they are, at alarm volume. Every delay is configurable.

STOP silences the phone but your people are still woken — a quiet phone doesn't mean the person is safe. Cancel is the deliberate stand-down that stops everything. A "power restored" alert is only sent if your people were already woken, so a cancelled false alarm doesn't generate a second one.

Brief flickers are filtered out automatically, so a momentary dip won't wake anyone.

Use the in-app Test Drill. It runs the whole ladder in about 15 seconds — popup, siren, then Stage 3 — and if your account has Pro connected, it sends a clearly labelled [TEST] alert to everyone watching, so you can confirm delivery end to end. Tap STOP ALARM at any point to end the drill.

You can also hit Test my setup in the web portal to alert your watchers without touching the phone.

Worth doing once when you set it up, and again a few weeks later. An alarm you've never tested is a guess.

No per-alert limits. Waking someone through their own app costs us nothing per alert. So there is no monthly allowance to run out of, and no daily ceiling to trip over on a bad night — a storm that cuts the power four times costs exactly what a quiet month costs.

This is new, and it is the reason we alert people the way we do. Pro used to include 60 texts and 20 call-minutes a month, because texts and calls are bought from a carrier by the message — to our launch market a single text costs more than a third of a day's subscription, so the allowance existed to stop the product losing money on exactly the customers who needed it most. Alerting people through their own app removes the meter, and with it the worst moment the old design could produce: an allowance running out partway through a bad night.

The one thing we still collapse is a flapping supply: power that fails and returns repeatedly produces a single "unstable power" notice rather than a dozen separate alarms. That is about not being ignored, not about cost.

Nothing is deleted. You keep the free app and your on-phone alarm, and your account and outage history stay available in the portal. What stops is the cloud layer: your phones disconnect and the people watching them are no longer woken. Resubscribe and everything reconnects — your watchers are still there, and nobody has to re-enter a code.

Watching works the other way round too: if somebody else pays for Pro and shares their phone with you, being woken about it costs you nothing and needs no subscription of your own.

To delete your account and all its data permanently, use the Danger zone at the bottom of the portal.