VicEmergency 4+

The app that cries wolf

Sooooo many notifications. Really, do I need to be alerted to the Riverine flood watch every 2 hours when the floods have been going on for weeks? No, no I don’t. Has anything changed? No? Then shut up already! One notification about the floods each day would be plenty, and it doesn’t need to beep! If I turn off notifications because I’m so sick and tired of being beeped at over nothing, then the app is pretty useless if there’s a real emergency in my watch zone isn’t it! I see that someone else left pretty much the same comment 2 years ago which you say was passed on to the developers yet nothing has changed.
The app is great in many ways, but seriously, fix this already. Reduce the number of notifications, and only have them beep if it is a true emergency that requires immediate attention. Otherwise it gets ignored and is pointless.
One more suggestion. Give us different tones that we can choose from. You could even go all out and let us choose different tones for different warnings or different times. So say if there’s an emergency that means I need to wake up and evacuate, I could choose a tone that would wake me during my sleep hours. Your current beeps don’t wake me because they happen so often and are usually pointless and I’ve tuned them out.
Come on developers. It can’t be that hard. It could be an amazing app if you just tweak it a bit.

Suggestions

The app does what it needs, but I could use some things. Here’s my suggestions:

Show more detailed information on the pop ups, things like fire size, what tyoe of fire (not just structure fire or bushfire etc) have it say what it’s doing, even if it doesn’t have an emergency warning, just give a little info of what it’s doing.

-a main idea would be putting what appliances and what service is going, so if it’s a fire, you put what FRV appliances are attending for instance: structure fire, attending units: P1A P1B etc. and then if it’s an EMR call you could put attending services: Ambulance Victoria, Fire Rescue Victoria. Then out like the call signs etc

Not as informative or clear as NSW FiresNMe app

I live on the VIC side of the VIC/ NSW border. So to keep informed we have to monitor two apps (NSW Fires Near Me and the Vic Emergency app).
The screen layout and functions on the NSW version is far simpler to follow and when you select an incident far more informative.
Vic app is trying to do too much on front screen so much so that overlays make reading harder like the warning area overlays.
And when you click an event the info is very limited or useless in comparison to the NSW app.

If you provide an option at least for users to turn layers on and off this might make the front incident alert clearer by allowing us to turn off overlays.

The most important info is where is the fire, how big is it, what has already burned, where is it headed (influence of current and coming weather), predicted spread, level of warning.
Much of this could be explained or shown on the map when ticked on/off by users. That way keeping the simplified view clean.

A National app would be more useful with a common layout and information. This would be better for travellers moving across states and for the many communities that live in state border regions, and for those that want to monitor impact to interstate relatives or friends.
Otherwise we have to use multiple apps with different layouts and symbols - crazy in this day given the seriousness and frequency of bushfires?

Fires don’t have borders!

Developer Response ,

Hi,
Thank you for getting in touch with us to provide your valued feedback. We have passed your comments onto our developers.
Kind regards,
Wolf