Custom Severe Weather Updates - Coming Soon

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We’re VERY close to launching 🚀 Severe Weather Updates inside of the app! What this means is, when you receive an update created by our team for tornado activity, damaging winds, etc., it will no longer say DETAILS ON FACEBOOK. Instead, it’ll take you to the app with all the details! 🙂 Woohoo!

Adam

Update - internal testing is going well

Text Message Alerts and app alerts

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Several have asked this question and I wanted to clarify the answer:

Question: "Do we still need to subscribe to Text Message Alerts if your free app is able to send out alerts?"

Answer: Text Message Alerts remain our most reliable option for alerts as they do not require internet access in order to work. Our free app InstantWeather always requires internet access to work and therefore, if your internet gets interrupted for whatever reason, you could potentially miss important notifications for tornado activity, etc.

During a violent tornado, the power often goes out which means Wi-Fi will go down for most. What happens then is, everyone tries to use cell tower data at the same time and unfortunately, it gets so bogged down that almost zero alerts come through from any option. The Ottawa tornadoes from 2018 are a perfect example of this as 10's of thousands complained that they did not receive any Tornado Warnings from any system, even though they were issued in advance. This was likely due to so many using the cell tower at the same time that most did not have the require LTE signal strength to receive automated government alerts. The only method that had a hope of getting through during those clogged times was a basic Text Message Alert (SMS) as it still works on weaker signal strengths such as Edge, 2G, and 3G.

I hope that makes sense and if you have any further questions regarding this, feel free to send us a private message or an email at help@InstantWeather.ca A huge thank you to those who continue to subscribe to our Text Message Alerts and to those who use our free app InstantWeather! Ultimately, the combination of the two is the best option as no single system is perfect. We also recommend downloading Environment Canada's mobile app WeatherCAN for alerts.

You can never be too redundant when it comes to critical alerts during tornado season. <3

- Adam

Severe Weather Updates

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We’re VERY close to launching 🚀 Severe Weather Updates inside of the app!

What this means is, when you receive an update created by our team for tornado activity, damaging winds, etc., it will no longer say DETAILS ON FACEBOOK. Instead, it’ll take you to the app with all the details! 🙂

Woohoo!

Adam

US alerts and US app availability

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Tornado🌪 related alerts are now up and running on our US Facebook pages! Woohoo! From California Tornado Watch to Florida Tornado Watch, we have a Tornado Watch page for every US state. This also means, the next version of our app will include all US alerts (tornado, flood, snowfall, etc.) and therefore, we’ll be launching the app in the US App Stores shortly there after! More details ASAP!

Adam

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Custom Severe Updates

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We’re working hard at adding our custom severe weather notification details to our new free app Instant Weather.

We send these custom severe updates out for tornado potential, dangerous wind gusts, large hail, and more.

Until we finish adding this feature, if you see a notification from us but nothing shows up in the app, please visit our Facebook page for the details.

We’re working hard to complete this feature! More details ASAP.

Thank you!

- Adam

Multiple Special Weather Statement update

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We're deploying new code to our servers soon to limit the multiple Special Weather Statements and limit many of the continued alerts that have been annoying, to say the least.

Woohoo!

The only exception will be anything tornado-related as any continued may have updated messages from Environment Canada in the details and those could be critical like "Spotter has confirmed a tornado the ground 20km east of Somethingville."

Here's hoping the new code runs flawlessly live but thankfully, if any fixes are required we can do them on our end without needing any app updates.

More details ASAP!

Emergency Alerts

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A few in Ontario are wondering why Instant Weather did not send out the Emergency Alert. To clarify, we have not integrated with "Alert Ready" government alerts as of yet.

We plan to add those in the future and also make them optional as we realize some do not receive the government Emergency Alerts if they're not connected to LTE or using the right device.

More details on that ASAP. Thank you!

Adam

Ps.

On the topic of customizing alerts, when we do add Alert Ready government alerts for all sorts of things from telephone outages to water advisories, it would be nice to also include the option to turn on/off every type of alert in the app. We flirted with this idea in the past for our Text Message Alerts and I feel it's an important option as everyone has unique needs and wants.