SOS Text Escalation

How does BuddySOS send SOS text alerts to my emergency contacts?

SOS text alerts go out by SMS to your emergency contacts the moment you tap the SOS button, carrying your live location with the message. It works even if that contact has never installed BuddySOS, so the one parent or partner who refuses to download another app still gets an alert they can act on.

Your SOS button already alerts the group inside the app. The problem is that your group is not always who you need. The person you most want reached in an emergency is often a parent or a partner who will never install a safety app just in case. SMS escalation covers them. Trigger SOS and BuddySOS sends each emergency contact a text through Twilio carrying a link to your live location. It arrives as an ordinary message over cell service, so it needs no data connection and no app on their end.

You set emergency contacts up beforehand, never in the moment. Pull them from your phone's contact list or type a number by hand for someone you have not saved. Do it while nothing is wrong.

Every tier gets this, including the free one. Competing safety apps put emergency response behind their priciest subscription, which leaves a family paying nothing with a map and no way to escalate to anyone outside the app. BuddySOS keeps the SOS button, the in-app alert, and the SMS escalation together as one free feature.

SMS also survives failures that kill push. A denied permission, a phone in a drawer, a flaky data connection: none of those block a text, because SMS travels a different path. A phone with cell signal but no data still gets the message in seconds rather than whenever its owner next opens an app.