Mast Pager on Android

Mast Pager on Android is the same app as the iPhone one: the same screens, the same copy, the same server, the same channels if you link the two. It's on Google Play, free, for Android 12 or later. It works with no account at all; a Tissue Mast account is optional and adds to it.

This page is only what differs. Channels, levels, the feed, the incident screen, vitals, the escalation partner, pause, quiet hours, link codes and retention are all on the iPhone page and behave the same way here. What Android does differently is the part between the push arriving and you hearing it, and that is most of what follows.

First run

Install it and open it. The phone registers itself with the server and that is the whole setup: no sign-up, no password. If the registration fails, the feed says so with a Retry button, and the phone can't be paged until it succeeds.

Notifications are not requested until you ask. The line at the top of the feed offers Turn on notifications; until you do, messages land in the feed and nowhere else. Say no to Android twice and it stops asking; the Waking you row in Settings then opens the app's notification settings for you instead.

With no channels the app opens on the Channels tab with New channel and See an example, exactly as on iPhone. See an example is also in Settings as Sample data.

Signing in to Tissue Mast

Mast Pager works without an account. A Tissue Mast account adds probes from eight locations, more vitals, a second phone that carries the same pages, and on call for a team.

In Settings, tap Sign in to Tissue Mast. A browser tab opens on tissue.systems, and if you're already signed in there it comes straight back. The phone then joins your account and gets its channels. If the phone already has channels of its own, Mast Pager asks before it switches, because those channels stop reaching this phone.

No account yet? Create a free account opens the sign-up page in a tab. Make one, come back, and tap Sign in to Tissue Mast.

If the tab finishes and the app doesn't pick it up, a link screen opens with the code filled in. Tap Accept. You can also make a code under Phones in the web app and type it in with Connect with a code.

Once you're signed in, Settings shows the account, its plan and what it's using, and Open Tissue Mast goes to the web app. Probes, status pages, the on-call schedule and plan changes all live there.

Making a page wake you

On iPhone a page is a critical alert, one entitlement Apple grants per app. Android has no such thing. A page gets through because of four separate settings, each of which the phone can take away on its own, and the Waking you row in Settings reads all of them live and offers a Fix button for each.

Notifications allowed for Mast. The permission from the first run. Without it nothing Mast receives can reach you.

Page channel on. Mast posts every message to one of five Android notification channels, Pages, Loud, Normal, Quiet and Updates, and the phone's own settings can turn any of them down. Pages are posted to Pages, which pops up and sounds the pager tone. The row takes you to that channel's settings when it has been turned down.

Pages ring through Do Not Disturb. A notification channel may be allowed to sound through Do Not Disturb, but only after you've given Mast Do Not Disturb access, and then only if the channel's own Override Do Not Disturb switch is on. The row walks you through both: first the access, then it switches the channel on by itself where Android lets it, and tells you to flip the switch where it doesn't. A page on a channel without the override is held by Do Not Disturb like any other notification.

Alarm volume up. A page plays the pager tone on the alarm stream, the way an alarm clock does. That means it follows the alarm volume, not the ring volume: a phone set to vibrate or silent still rings for a page, and the alarm volume at zero silences it. If Do Not Disturb is set to silence alarms, a row named Alarms silenced right now appears and says so; allow alarms in Do Not Disturb, or turn it off.

Below those, three rows that aren't about sound:

Pages open over the lock screen. A page takes the whole screen on a locked phone, with Acknowledge and Resolve on it. Android 14 and later ask you to allow this per app, and the row opens that setting. Without it a page is a banner.
Mast isn't battery optimised. With battery optimisation on, Android can hold a push back while the phone sleeps, which for a page means minutes. The fix is the system's own exemption prompt.
Re-rings on time. An unanswered page rings again every 90 seconds from the phone's own clock, three times, under the server's own repeats. That needs exact alarm scheduling; without it a re-ring can wait a few minutes while the phone sleeps. This one is advisory, not required.

Two more rows appear only when they apply. Android delayed a page this week means a push the server sent as urgent arrived as ordinary, which Android does once it has decided Mast wastes wakeups; the battery settings are the fix. Your phone's battery manager appears on phones from makers whose own battery managers stop apps on a schedule of their own (Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Honor, OnePlus, Realme, Oppo) and opens the steps for your model on dontkillmyapp.com.

One thing nobody can check for you: Mast allowed in your Modes (Settings → Modes → Do Not Disturb → Apps). And one thing not to do: Force stop in app info. After that Android delivers nothing to Mast until you open the app again. Swiping it away from recent apps is fine.

The line under the page level in the feed says what a page would do on this phone right now (Do Not Disturb would silence a page, the alarm volume is at zero · a page would not sound, battery optimisation can delay a page) and its What to check button opens the list. Send yourself a test page before you rely on it.

What a page sounds like

The same six tones as on iPhone: default, bleep, chirp, rising, pager and klaxon, picked per channel under Sound, or named for one message with sound=. A page nobody chose a tone for arrives as pager.

A page's tone is played by the app itself, not by the notification. Some phones, Samsung's among them, skip a notification's sound entirely in vibrate or silent mode, override or no override, and a pager that depends on that sound is a pager that stays quiet in a pocket. So when a page lands, Mast plays the tone on the alarm stream and keeps playing it until you answer, swipe the card away, or 45 seconds pass; each re-ring and each repeat from the server starts it again. The other levels keep the channel's own sound: at those levels the sound is an interruption, not a summons.

Answering a page

Acknowledge means I have this. Resolve means it's over. Both stop the tone, the re-rings and the escalation clock, and both leave a line in the message's log.

Swiping the card away is neither. It stops the tone and the phone's own re-rings, because a card that's gone has nothing to ring for, but the server still has an unanswered page and sends it again on the channel's repeat, so the card comes back. The lock-screen line under the card says what it did on landing, read off this phone's settings: page alert · rings through Do Not Disturb, loud alert · breaks through Do Not Disturb, standard alert, arrived silently.

The notification. Expand it: Acknowledge, Resolve, Mute channel 1h. All three work from the lock screen without unlocking. Android draws three buttons on a card, so a page's card has no room for This isn't mine; that one is on the incident screen and behind a long-press on the row. Loud and normal messages offer Resolve, Mute channel 1h and This isn't mine; quiet ones the last two. This isn't mine always asks for your screen lock first and opens the app.
The full-screen page. On a locked phone a page turns the screen on and opens itself over the lock screen, with Acknowledge and Resolve at the foot. Allowing that is the Pages open over the lock screen row above.
The app. The pinned page in the feed, and the foot of the incident screen: Acknowledge, Resolve, Mute for 1 hour, This isn't mine.

A page that arrived while the phone was off is not lost. After a restart, after an app update, and whenever the push service tells the app it dropped messages, Mast pulls the feed and rings for whatever is still waiting on a human.

What's on iPhone and not here

Apple Watch, and the Live Activity card in the Dynamic Island. On Android the full-screen card and the notification are the two places a page lives.
Siri, Shortcuts and the Action button. There is no voice or automation path to acknowledge a page on Android.
The vitals widget. The wall of dots is at the top of the feed; there is no home-screen or lock-screen version of it.
Critical alerts. The Android equivalent is the four settings above, and unlike the iPhone entitlement any of them can quietly change later, which is why the checklist reads them every time it opens.

A reinstall, a second phone, or moving between an iPhone and an Android phone is the same link code in both directions: sign in to the web app, make a code under Phones, and Connect with a code on the new phone. The channels and the pages come across; the wake settings don't, because they belong to the phone.