How Emergency Location Works: A Step-by-Step Walkthrough

From the moment you miss a check-in to the moment your contact sees a neighborhood pin — here is exactly what happens, in order, and where you are in control at every step.

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The end-to-end path takes about 11 minutes — 10 minutes of grace inside our 4-stage escalation, then seconds for the capture + delivery — and involves exactly one location reading per stage.

The Challenge

Users say 'I don't know what triggers the app' — uncertainty breeds lack of trust and eventual uninstallation

Family members say 'I don't know what I'll see if something happens' — and therefore cannot make informed setup decisions

Privacy decisions made without understanding the flow lead to either over-sharing or under-sharing

How I'm Alive Helps

Every stage has a clear trigger, a clear action, and a clear user-facing signal so nothing happens silently

Each stage adds information only to the specific contact who needs it at that moment, not to a public or analytics-facing log

You can inspect your own history at any time on the Activity screen, and revoke the permission that gates the whole thing with one toggle

The 8 steps, in order

1. You miss your daily check-in. The grace window on your account starts — by default 15 minutes. During this window you receive a push notification and an email to check in; nothing goes to your contacts yet. 2. Grace expires. The escalation cron (runs every 5 minutes) promotes the incident to stage 1. Your contacts still see nothing; you get a more urgent reminder. 3. Stage 2 fires after another ~5 minutes if you still haven't checked in. You are sent a final reminder with a direct check-in link. Contacts still see nothing. 4. Stage 3 fires around the 10-minute mark. This is the first time the contact is notified — they receive a push, email, and SMS with a link to confirm you're safe on the contact-resolution page. If you are on Family Plus, this is also the moment an invisible silent push is sent to your phone requesting a location capture. 5. Your phone app wakes. Expo Notifications fires the `capture_location` handler, which asks iOS for your current location at "balanced" accuracy (about 100-meter range; we round to 11-meter precision before storage). 6. Your phone reverse-geocodes the coordinate to a neighborhood name ("Near Oxford Circus") using the OS's built-in service — nothing leaves the device for this. 7. Your phone POSTs four fields to our capture endpoint: the coarse lat/lng, the neighborhood name, and an accuracy estimate. The endpoint refuses this unless you are on an active Family Plus plan and the incident exists. 8. The contact refreshes their resolution page — or opens it for the first time — and sees a new "Emergency location" card with the neighborhood name and a map pin. Everything else — your name, the incident history, the escalation stage — was already on that page from step 4.

Where you are in control

Several places. Pick any and you stop the flow without breaking the rest of the safety net. Grant or decline the location permission. This is the first iOS dialog you see after activating Family Plus. Declining it disables step 5 onward — you still escalate normally, your contact still gets notified normally, there is just no location card on their view. Cancel the check-in. If you do this in steps 1-2, nothing at all goes to contacts. If you do this in steps 3-4, the incident resolves and the location capture push cancels (or if it already fired, the captured row is visible for a few seconds and then the view disappears). Revoke Family Plus. Going back to Family tier stops new captures at the endpoint's 403 response. Any live captures from before the downgrade still complete their 72-hour cycle. Permission toggle in Settings. A single switch in the app's settings screen (shown after Family Plus is active) turns location entirely off for this app even if the iOS permission is granted. The app honors this switch server-side too, so there is no way to leak via a stale client.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How long does the whole escalation take before location is captured?

About 10-11 minutes from your missed check-in time. Stage 1 fires at minute 5, stage 2 at minute 10, stage 3 at minute 10-11. Stage 3 is the earliest that a contact is ever notified, and also the earliest that a location capture is attempted.

What if my phone has no internet or cell signal when the silent push arrives?

The capture fails silently — no location is recorded, the incident proceeds without location, and the contact sees the usual 'no location available' state. When the phone regains service, the stale silent push is not acted on (it expired with the incident).

What if I'm somewhere with poor GPS, like deep indoors or underground?

iOS and Android will return whatever the best available fix is at that moment — typically cell-tower triangulation, which is much less precise than GPS but still usable (city-block level rather than 11 meters). The accuracy field on the capture reflects this, and the contact sees a larger 'approximate' radius.

Can my emergency contact request a location reading outside of an escalation?

No. The capture endpoint only accepts requests from the phone of the monitored user, only during an active incident that user caused, and only at stage 3 or stage 4 of the escalation. There is no button for a contact to 'ping' you.

How does this handle multiple emergencies in close succession?

Each incident has a unique ID. The capture endpoint uses a UNIQUE constraint on (incident_id, stage), so you get at most one capture per stage per incident, with deduplication if the same push is retried. If a second incident opens after the first resolves, it captures fresh.