Mast Pager on iPhone

Mast Pager is the phone half of Tissue Mast: the app that rings, the settings that decide how loudly, and the buttons that answer. It's on the App Store as Mast Pager, free, for iPhone on iOS 17.2 or later. The Android app is on Google Play, for Android 12 or later. It works with no account at all; signing in to Tissue Mast is optional and adds to it.

This page is the manual for the app itself, written from the iPhone. The Android app is the same app with a different route from the push to your ear; the Android page has only what differs. What a sender can put in a message is on Sending alerts; what happens to a page between the send and the lock screen is under Delivery.

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, no permission prompt yet. If the registration fails, the feed says so with a Retry button, and the phone can't be paged until it succeeds.

With no channels the app opens on the Channels tab. Two things are offered:

• New channel makes your first address. The rest of this page follows from there.
• See an example opens a full copy of the app on sample data, marked demo data · nothing here is live on every screen, so you can see a page, a flatlined vital and a storm before you have any of your own. Close brings you back.

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, and the app checks the server every few seconds while it's open to make up for it. Critical alerts, the permission that lets a page beat the ringer switch, are a separate step, under making a page wake you.

A reinstall starts unregistered, as a new phone. Getting your old channels back is a link code, not a sign-in.

Channels on the phone

The Channels tab has New channel, which asks for a name, a kind (a channel, or a vital where silence is the alert) and a default level, and hands you the key card: the address as text and a QR code, Copy, Share, and a curl line. Every setting is a row on the channel's own page. Channels and levels has what each one does.

The tab is two sections, vitals and channels, each row with a one-line summary: pages, escalates to Sam, quiet hours 22–07, muted until 14:10, 3 today. Swipe right on a row to Mute 1h (or Unmute); swipe left to Delete, behind a confirmation. Neither fires on a full swipe. Pull the row and the button waits to be tapped.

Making a page wake you

A page is delivered as a critical alert once you've allowed it: it sounds with the ringer switch off and the volume all the way down, and it goes through a Sleep Focus. Apple grants that entitlement app by app, and it's off until you turn it on from the phone that will be woken.

The gear on either tab opens Settings. Under this device, the Critical alerts row has a Turn on button. iOS asks you once, and only once per install; say no and there's no second prompt, only the Settings app, which is why the row then reads Open Settings.

Until it's on, a page arrives as time-sensitive instead. That gets through a Focus, Sleep included, but not past the ringer switch. The Waking you row in Settings is a checklist of what a page has to get past on this phone:

• What this phone reports, checked live, each with a button that fixes it: notifications allowed for Mast, Time Sensitive on for Mast, critical alerts on for Mast.
• What nobody can check for you, because iOS won't tell an app: Mast allowed in your Sleep Focus (Settings → Focus → Sleep → Apps), and the ringer on.

The line under the page level in the app says what a page would do on this phone right now (standard alert · Focus can hold it back, sound is off · pages will arrive silent) and turns amber when one could go unheard. The lock screen then names what a page did do as it lands: critical alert · sounded through silent or time sensitive · breaks through Focus, read off the phone's own settings, not off what the sender asked for. Send yourself one before you rely on it.

What a page sounds like

Six tones ship with the app: default, bleep, chirp, rising, pager and klaxon. A channel picks one under Sound, tapping a tone plays it even with the ringer on silent, and a sender can name a different one for a single message with sound=.

A page nobody chose a tone for arrives as pager. The system alert tone is about a second long, which is the right length for a notification and the wrong length for something promising to ring until you answer. The other levels keep the system tone: at those levels the sound is an interruption, not a summons.

Quiet hours, mute, and pausing pages

Quiet hours and mute are channel settings, and Pause pages in Settings holds every page on this phone for half an hour, an hour or two hours, then sends the unanswered ones again at full volume. Channels and levels has how each one treats a page.

The feed

The feed is the Mast tab. Down the screen: the pause banner if one is running, a notice line (no connection · as of 09:12, 3 acknowledged, waiting to reach the server), a pages arrived while the phone was off banner, the pinned page, the wall of vitals, the filter, and the list.

The pinned page is the oldest unacknowledged page: PAGING · 3:14, the channel, the message, a red Acknowledge, and under it what happens next. Nobody acknowledges by 07:27 → Sam gets paged. Repeats every 2 min until someone acknowledges. Stops on its own at 08:00, nobody else is told. If more pages are waiting, a counter under the card opens the Pages filter.

Rows show the channel, the time, the message, and where they apply: ×47 for repeats folded by dedupe or storm control, an open or resolved pill, silent for one that arrived without a sound, the dedupe key, and first link from this channel on the first message from a channel that carried a URL.

Filters: All, Loud (loud and above, or anything that needs acknowledging), Pages.

Gestures: swipe right to mute the channel for an hour, swipe left to resolve, on a page that hasn't been closed and on nothing else. Long-press for Copy message, Copy incident and This isn't mine.

One message

Tap a row and the incident screen has everything the server knows about it: the channel, when it fired, its key, a status line (QUEUED, DELIVERED, ACKNOWLEDGED, RESOLVED, EXPIRED · unacknowledged, SUPPRESSED), the body with Copy and Share, and a log: fired, seen again ×3, repeated 4 of 30, escalated to Sam, acknowledged · Denis's iPhone, resolved. Three timestamps sit with it, sent, shown and acknowledged, each a full date or not yet. If the sender asked for a level it didn't get, a line says so: asked for page · sent loud · critical alerts are off on this device.

The first link a channel ever sends is shown as text and opens only after Show link. A leaked address can put a page on a lock screen, and the first link from a new sender is where a phishing attempt would sit. Delivery has why.

At the foot: Acknowledge, Resolve, Mute for 1 hour, and This isn't mine.

Answering a page

Acknowledge means I have this. It stops the repeat and stops the escalation clock. Resolve means it's over. Both leave a line in the message's log, next to the ones the server wrote.

Dismissing the notification is neither. Swipe a page out of the notification list and it keeps repeating, because a swipe is also what a hand does to a phone in a pocket. Every state change in Mast is a button somebody pressed on purpose, which is why Acknowledge is never a swipe action and is the only red button in the app.

All of these answer the same page:

• The notification. Pull it down or press and hold: Acknowledge, Resolve, Mute channel 1h, This isn't mine. The first three work from the lock screen without Face ID and without opening the app. Loud and normal messages offer the last three; quiet ones the last two.
• The live card. An unacknowledged page keeps a card on the lock screen and in the Dynamic Island, counting up from the moment it fired, showing how many times it has repeated and when it escalates, with Acknowledge and Resolve on it. It reads acknowledged or resolved for a few seconds afterwards and goes away. With Live Activities turned off for Mast, the page arrives as a plain notification instead.
• Apple Watch. Pages reach a paired Watch by notification forwarding, with Acknowledge, Resolve and Mute on the notification. Acknowledging from the wrist goes back through the phone.
• Siri, Shortcuts, the Action button. "Acknowledge the page in Mast" (also "Ack the page in Mast", "Mast acknowledge") answers the page that has been waiting longest and says which one: Acknowledged db-01. 2 still paging. The same step is available to a Shortcut and to the Action button. It answers the oldest page, not the newest, because in a storm the newest is already on the screen and the one at risk of moving to someone else's phone is the one that has waited longest. Resolve is deliberately not offered to Siri.

One case none of them can act on: a phone that hasn't been unlocked since it was last restarted keeps Mast's files sealed, so the app can neither read what is paging nor record an answer. The feed, Siri and the Watch each say so instead of reporting an acknowledgement that never happened.

Closing a page from the thing that opened it

A monitor that pages usually also knows when the problem is over. Send a key with the page, then one more message on the same key with resolve=1. The recovery isn't a second card: its words replace the outage text on the card already on the phone, which turns green where it sits, the repeat and the escalation stop, and every device the page reached gets a quiet update. A vital does this on its own: the first beat after a silence closes the page the silence opened.

"This isn't mine"

A page from a channel you don't recognise, or a channel whose key has leaked, has one button: This isn't mine, on the notification (this one asks for Face ID and opens the app), on the incident screen, or from a long-press on the row. It pauses the channel and replaces its key in one step, so whoever holds the old address is cut off and whatever you run that sent to it needs the new key from the channel's page. Undo turns the channel back on and leaves the key replaced. Delivery has the reasoning.

Vitals in the app

A vital is drawn as a dot: green while it's reporting in, amber while it's late, red once it has flatlined, grey while paused. The wall of dots sits at the top of the feed, with a line under it: all reporting, backups is 12 m late · grace until 03:47, cron-nightly went silent · grace ran out at 13:27. Tap a dot to open that channel. When a page is waiting the wall folds down to make room for it.

The vitals section of the Channels tab has the detail per vital: last heartbeat 03:19 · due every 1 h, or waiting for its first heartbeat.

The wall is also a widget: two sizes on the home screen, and a circle, a rectangle or a single line on the lock screen and in the Smart Stack. It reads 5 of 6 and turns amber or red on its own as a vital goes late, without the app running. A tap opens Channels.

A quiet pager and a broken one look identical from the outside. The wall is how you tell them apart without sending anything: every dot green means the things that would wake you are still checking in. Vitals has the periods, schedules, run limits and the badge.

A second phone

A page nobody acknowledges can move on to someone else. With an account, that's an escalation policy. Without one, it's an escalation partner on the channel: another phone that agreed to be woken, paired with a one-time code. On call has both.

Settings

The gear on either tab. getting started has the Mast Pager page of these docs and the example. this device has the device name and its md_… id (tap to copy; acknowledgements and deliveries carry it), the Critical alerts row, Waking you, Pause pages, and the version. Below that, the account section.

Signing in to Tissue Mast

Mast Pager works without an account. Sign in to Tissue Mast in Settings opens the sign-in page in a sheet; sign in or make a free account, and the phone links itself to that login. From then on your probes, vitals and on-call policies page this phone, the web app shows its channels, and the channels outlive the phone. Connect with a code does the same with a code from the web app's Phones screen. Watch your first site has both.

A reinstalled phone

A reinstall, or a new phone, registers as a new device with nothing on it. To give it the channels you already have, sign in to the web app, open Phones, and make a link code. On the phone, Connect with a code takes the eight characters (no 0, 1, I or O, so a code read aloud can't be misheard). The phone joins that login: it gets the login's channels and pages, and channels made on the new phone before the link stop reaching it. A code works once, for a few minutes. Scanning a mast://link/… QR does the same through an Accept sheet.

Without an account, a reinstalled phone is a new owner, and the old channels are gone with the old install. Connecting an account is what makes the channels outlive the phone.

Retention

Messages leave the feed when they age out of your plan's history: 7 days on Free, 30 on Solo, 90 on Team, 365 on Company. Without an account, a phone keeps 7 days. A message the server no longer holds shows as aged out of retention, or deleted when opened. Limits has the rest of the plan caps.