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Apps Need to create app to send a fixed message to groups

T

Tim Martindale

Lurker
Hi all - hoping someone can help with this query.

I'm a member of a volunteer emergency service in the UK. We are issued with VHF pagers for emergency response however they are notoriously unreliable.

I'd like to develop a very simple app that, at a press of a button, sends a fixed text message, 'Shout', to the other members of the team via: our Facebook group; WhatsApp group; text and email - as a fail-safe way of making sure the whole team have been contacted. A multi-media paging system.

I'm a graphic designer and have no experience of creating apps so have no idea how easily achievable this would be.

Is this do-able?

Many thanks for your help.
 
Maybe an online service with associated apps would be a possible solution that would meet the messaging redundancy requirement. It may be interesting to create your own online forum specifically for emergency incidents. When creating a new topic in the forum, an alert is generated which triggers a series of redundant notifications such as email notices, push notifications and data synch with social media via forum plugins. The emergency incident forum topic could include posts with map references, photos, etc...

It is relatively easy to setup a xenforo forum. Here is a link to a few hosting services:
http://www.besthosting.org/5-best-hosting-for-xenforo/

There are a number of apps that will function in this context. For instance, pushover can be configured to operate with xenforo forum software to receive push notifications generated by the forum:
https://pushover.net/clients

Xenforo addon for publishing topic to social:
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/bd-social-share.2182/

If you already have whatsapp, take a look at this guide for configuring and troubleshooting notifications:
http://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/android/20887936
 
Last edited:
Thanks for taking the time to reply Autonomous1. Unfortunately when the pagers go off we wouldn't have time to create a forum post. It needs to be a simple button push, and run! Am I correct in thinking that Pushover can't send SMS though?
 
I think a Tasker task like the following would do what you want. It sends "Alert Message" to three numbers.

Alert
A1: Send SMS [ Number:123-123-1234 Message:Alert Message Store In Messaging App:Off Continue Task After Error:On ]
A2: Send SMS [ Number:456-456-4567 Message:Alert Message Store In Messaging App:Off Continue Task After Error:On ]
A3: Send SMS [ Number:567-567-5678 Message:Alert Message Store In Messaging App:Off Continue Task After Error:On ]

... checkout the Tasker forum at Android Forums for more information.

... Thom
 
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