SAS 12+
Supplementary Alerting Service
State of Victoria - Department of Justice
-
- Free
Screenshots
Description
The Supplementary Alerting Service app is an official Victorian Government app for career and volunteer emergency services personnel. It supplements and connects to the Emergency Alerting System in use today by career and volunteer emergency service personnel across Victoria.
Supported agencies are CFA, SES and AV (Rural). Your agency needs to provide you with login details to access this app.
Main features:
• Notifications of emergencies
• Respond to emergencies, view other responders and their ETA to the event
• Chat with other agency users
• Forecast availability
What’s New
Version 9.0.0
Release 9.0.0 is a major release for SAS and is supported on iOS 17 (as of 30th Jan 2024) and 2 previous iOS versions.
Changes include:
- Enhancements to maps, pager history and user accounts
- Various bug fixes
- Security improvements
Ratings and Reviews
Quicker than Pager
I have found that the VicEmergency App alerts first, followed by SAS and then the Pager.
Have had been logged out a few times without knowing it. Wouldn’t solely rely on it.
Would be handy if it was available on Apple Watch, particularly for using directions to an incident.
Has potential
The app has the potential to be great but unfortunately falls short in most areas, with most of the features feeling like they got started but never finished off properly.
It seems like the developers searched through BART for all the great/user friendly features and then said ‘we won’t be using these’.
Undoubtably the worst feature is the availability. It is tediously difficult to set, read and understand and then once you have invested the extraordinary amount of time for what should be a simple task, the only person that can see it is yourself. Why would I need to see my own availability, I already know it? The two biggest reasons for having a ‘S.A.S.’ Is for those without pagers and to know your brigades availability to make decisions around taking time off, predicting crewing availability and to see who will be attending each job. Unless you’re admin and prepared to constantly download a report as people update their availability, the feature is useless, except for the seeing who’s attending portion.
The general layout and look is quite good but given that it’s a phone, you want to be able to click attending before driving so being able to do from the pager screen without clicking right into each job would be better. Also, iPhone needs to add the critical alerts feature.
Possible enhancements
I gave been using SAS for about 6 months as a SES volunteer and find it very good to use. During the recent weather event, August 2024, the app alerted hundreds of times and one day probably every minute when a new job was assigned. I was frustrating when searching for a job say from the previous day and a new job alerts. The app will refresh the page to the new job. So you then have to scroll back through the hundreds of jobs to search again.
2 possible enhancements.
1. Add a search by job number
2. Do not refresh the job page when a new job alert comes in.
App Privacy
The developer, State of Victoria - Department of Justice, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer's privacy policy.
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- State of Victoria - Department of Justice
- Size
- 128.8 MB
- Category
- Utilities
- Compatibility
-
- iPhone
- Requires iOS 11.0 or later.
- iPad
- Requires iPadOS 11.0 or later.
- iPod touch
- Requires iOS 11.0 or later.
- Apple Vision
- Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- Languages
-
English
- Age Rating
- 12+ Infrequent/Mild Medical/Treatment Information Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco or Drug Use or References Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes
- Location
- This app may use your location even when it isn't open, which can decrease battery life.
- Copyright
- © Department of Justice & Community Safety, Victoria
- Price
- Free