The system itself is incredibly helpful, but it seems like the missing person alert being in the required category is holding the whole app hostage. I hate to say that because I don’t want it to seem heartless, but in a city impacting tens of millions of people per day, the focus of specific individuals going to all of our phones as a citywide emergency seems political or personal. which unfortunately is inappropriate for the purpose of this app which can save many peoples lives at once as opposed to crowd, sourcing an entire city to solve individual cases.Additionally, in the app, which I downloaded to circumvent the email frequency, it doesn’t even include a picture of the person in the app. I was literally going to unsubscribe from the emails so that I could not have it pop up across all of my devices simultaneously when I get an email alert and just have it limited to my phone screen, but even if trying to help on the phone, you have to open each individual missing person and then find the image link to click.

They allow you to select the type of alerts but “Emergency Alerts” are required. However, even tho I only get Emergency Alerts, I often get 5 alerts a day for stupid non-emergency stuff like “Get your COVID booster” and other reminders. The people who run this app and send our alerts need to make sure that Emergency Alerts are true emergencies and not just public service announcements, or segregate those into optional notifications. Also, we should have an option to receive amber/grey alerts.

The app is overall great, but if you do not go into the app for a couple of days, you get pop-ups in the app of every notification you haven’t seen yet. The pop-up has one button that says OK and another saying Details. The pop-ups prevent you from navigating to notifications that you want to read. The developers need to introduce a Dismiss All button or just eliminate the pop-ups and rely on users having notifications appear on their banner instead.

My 5-star rating is certainly graded on a curve, for city-developed apps. But it actually works and is very helpful at times, as long as the people issuing the alerts are thoughtful about what they push out. There are other apps for traffic and transit issues, but this is a good one to have for those odd alerts that you’ll be glad to have when you need it. If you live or work in NYC, it’s worth installing.