Mast Pager

Mast Pager is the app that rings. It's on the App Store, free, for iPhone on iOS 17.2 or later. The Android app is on Google Play, free, for Android 12 or later.

It does two jobs. Signed in, it's the phone Tissue Mast pages when a probe, a vital or anything else you've wired up needs a person. On its own, with no account, it's a pager anything can post to.

On its own, or with an account

Install it and open it. The phone registers itself and that's the whole setup: no sign-up, no password. Make a channel and it hands you a URL, and anything that can make an HTTP request can now ring your phone:

$ curl -d "disk 92% on db1" https://mast.tissue.dev/mk_9f2a41c8b7
{"ok":true,"id":"mm_7a3e5b91c04d2f68a1b3c5d7e9f02468","state":"queued"}

The body of the request is the message. The phone is the credential and the address is the only secret.

On its own, a phone gets 2 channels, 1 vital, 1,000 messages a month and 7 days of history. Signing in to Tissue Mast, under Sign in to Tissue Mast in the app's settings, adds:

Signing in doesn't change the app. Your channels, keys and messages stay where they are, and nothing on the sending side needs changing. Watch your first site is the five-minute version.

Four levels

Every message carries one of four levels, and the level decides what the phone does:

• quiet: into the feed. No sound, no banner.
• normal: a banner and a sound, held by the ringer switch, a Focus and the channel's quiet hours.
• loud: time-sensitive, so it gets through a Focus. Once, no repeat.
• page: rings through silent mode and repeats every two minutes until somebody acknowledges it, then moves on to the next person.

A channel has a default level and a ceiling a sender can never go above, so an address pasted into a CI config can't wake you unless you said it could. Channels and levels has picking a level, the ceiling, quiet hours, mute and pausing pages.

Making a page wake you

A pager that doesn't wake you is worse than no pager. Each phone has its own settings that can take a page away, and the app checks them for you: the Waking you row in its settings lists each one live, with a button that fixes it.

• On iPhone, a page is a critical alert once you've turned Critical alerts on. That sounds with the ringer off and the volume down, and through a Sleep Focus. Until then a page is time-sensitive, which gets through a Focus but not the ringer switch. iPhone.
• On Android, a page plays on the alarm stream and rings through Do Not Disturb once you've given the app Do Not Disturb access. Battery optimisation is the other thing to turn off. Android.

The lock screen says what a page did as it lands, read off the phone's own settings: critical alert · sounded through silent, or time sensitive · breaks through Focus. Send yourself one before you rely on it.

Answering

Acknowledge means I have this. It stops the repeat and the escalation. Resolve means it's over. Both are on the notification itself and work from the lock screen with no Face ID and no app launch, because the point of a pager is the seconds.

Swiping a page out of the notification list is neither. It keeps repeating, because a swipe is also what a hand does to a phone in a pocket. Every state change is a button somebody pressed on purpose.

The rest of what the app does, the feed, the wall of vitals, the widget, Siri and the Watch, is on the iPhone and Android pages.

Things people page themselves with

• A backup or a cron job. A vital pages when the check-ins stop. One curl on the end of the crontab line.
• Home Assistant. A water leak, a freezer, a door left open. Home Assistant.
• A spot on the band. HamAlert and DX cluster spots, quiet by default and loud for the one you've been chasing. Ham radio.
• A deploy, a payment, a webhook. Any service that can call a URL. Sending alerts has every field a send takes.

A day on the pager follows one Tuesday end to end: what arrives, what waits for the morning, and the one thing that wakes somebody at 02:58.