Pushover Notifications

I have been using Pushover for more than a year to receive critical alerts for work. I go on call once every three weeks and this app has never let me down. The feature that I like the most from the paid service is that I can create an application with its own email address and set up my alerts to go to that email address. Any of my devices running pushover can then receive that alert. The service itself is far more configurable than that but for the sake of brevity I will keep it short. Also one of my other favorite things is the API. We are going to be doing some very interesting things with alerts that require acknowledgment. My biggest request is that Superblock LLC would add a third type of alert (level 3?) that has an approve/deny response instead of a simple repeat alert until acknowledged. I would like to be able to push approve/deny workflow items to my phone and be able to capture those responses on the backend or with a postback like I can with level 2. It would also be great if the repeat frequency of the level 2 and 3 alerts could be configured.

I’m one of those people who never rate or review apps unless they stand out from the crowd. Pushover is one of those apps. Every app supports push notifications for their service, but if you are looking for an app that makes it easy to integrate push notifications with anything else you can talk to, this is the solution for you. In an afternoon I was able to build a notification system for ONEMI alerts for Chile using Huginn and Pushover, and the bulk of that time was spent on configuring the Huginn agents. Pushover made it easy to define an app and a delivery group that others can subscribe to, so even non-technical people can benefit from having public safety alerts delivered to their devices. The pricing model is sane, and Pushover is an app that I am happy to pay for. Truly top notch.

This app works great for notifications to my iPhone but my associated Apple Watch notifications are often delayed and/or unreliable. I have my home automation system pushing these notifications and my phone gets every one of them and almost instantly. The Watch only gets some of them and often delayed. I use many other apps with watch notifications without issue so it is not a communication or settings problem. I can have my automation hub send the exact same notifications to pushover and it’s own app and my iPhone will get both notifications at the same second. My watch gets the automation app notifications also at the same second, the pushover notification comes sometimes at the same time, sometimes a few seconds later and sometimes never. This app is literally the only one that I have the problem with. I have reinstalled both the phone and watch app and tried all combinations of Bluetooth, WiFi and Cellular connections with the watch and the phone ... nothing fixes this issue.

I came upon Pushover when trying to come up with a decent experience with home security camera alerts. This app and the api that powers it is exactly what I was looking for. I’m able to simply use curl or even email with attachments to push a gif preview of a camera event to my device, and customize the message to include multiple links. The client app is only 11 Megabytes which is probably the smallest app on the phone by far. The default free plan includes a huge amount (tens of thousands) of notifications a month, and the $4.99 client price is absolutely justified, especially when replacing a really horrible cloud camera server at $6.99.

I’m sad that with the new Apple update that includes a “dark mode”, that Pushover decided to get rid of the toggle switch. I loved having that app on dark mode, but when I tried out dark mode on my iPhone I was not a fan. Now it’s all or nothing it appears, which stinks because I do use Pushover at night and would have preferred to keep the app on dark mode. Please consider bringing the toggle feature back! UPDATE: Dark mode toggle has been added back in - THANK YOU!