PAssist is an Android application to assist you while doing on-call duties. The name PAssist is the short form of Pikett-Assist ('Pikett' is the Swiss German term for on-call).
PAssist works for SMS based alerting systems.
PAssist is available in two flavors: oss and playstore.
Since release 3.0.0 the oss flavor is the default flavor.
This flavor contains all functionality and has the best usability as it is less restricted by rules of the Google Play Store.
The oss flavor is used for main development and testing cycles.
The playstore flavor exists for ease of installation for standard Android users. Since release 3.0.0 the functionality and usability has minor limitations compared to the oss flavor.
This flavor is less tested compared to the oss flavor.
PAssist activates and deactivates itself based on your calendar. All supervision features are only running, when PAssist is activated. PAssist activates some time (configurable pre-/ post-run time) before and keeps activated some time after the events start and stop time. This ensures you won't miss an alert in case of a small time discrepancy between the operations center time and your phone time. All calendar events matching a configured title pattern are considered as on-call events. PAssist shows you an overview with all future on-call events on the calendar tab.
If an SMS is received from your configured operations center, PAssist will raise an alert. It is playing a configured ringtone and starts a vibration pattern until you confirm it with a swipe button. When confirmed, an acknowledgement is sent back to your operations center. The alarm goes into the confirmed alarm state and can be finally closed when all your support activities are completed.
PAssist creates an alarm log with the start and end time of each incident. All SMS messages received between start and end time are attached to the alarm in the log. On the alert log tab you see all your passed alerts in an overview. Selecting an entry shows the details of an alert incident including current state, reaction time to confirm, duration from start to end and all received SMS messages. The alert log can be exported/imported from/to the external file system.
PAssist will supervise the phone signal strength and notifies you with a vibration pattern if the signal strength is bad or off (includes airplane mode). This ensures that you won't stay in a dead spot without recognizing it during on-call duties.
PAssist will supervise the battery level and notifies if it is below a configured minimum level.
PAssist can control the ringtone volume during on-call duty with separate profiles for day and night.
If the SMS alarming system in use sends daily test alarms to verify the alarming chain from end to end, PAssist can be configured to automatically receive and acknowledge them, without interrupting the user. On a configured daily check time, PAssist verifies if the expected test alarms have been received. If not, PAssist will raise an alert with a configured ringtone and starts a vibration pattern until you confirm the missing test alarm with a swipe button. Test alarms can be configured for different contexts, as your alarming system may send a test alarms for various systems that are under supervision.
PAssist can be installed from IzzyOnDroid or Google Play.
| Store | App-Flavor | Limitations |
|---|---|---|
 |
oss | none |
 |
playstore | manual contact syncing required |
You can download the APK file in the oss flavor from the Github release page. To install the APK you need to allow installation from unknown sources.
Build PAssist on your own and then install the APK via ADB to your android phone. You can decide which flavor to use.
In order to perform the functions of PAssist, PAssist needs to be able to receive and send SMS. As these SMS permissions are no more granted by Google, a compatible SMS adapter is required.
Currently the only supported SMS adapter is S2MSP. PAssist will guide you to install this SMS adapter.
Is S2MSP a safe app? Read the reason why the answer is yes: Why Secure‐SMS‐Proxy (S2MSP) is Safe!
Google restricted contact read permissions in Android 17. To keep PAssist running smoothly, the app can now operate without these permissions by utilizing the new, privacy-friendly contact picker. Unfortunately, this change introduces some important drawbacks for PAssist:
- Operations Center: You must re-select your operations center contact after upgrading to Android 17. Additionally, if this contact's details change in the future, you will need to manually re-select them so PAssist can see the updates.
- Partner Contacts: These can no longer be automatically linked via nicknames. You will now need to manually assign each partner contact.
If you prefer automatic contact syncing (requires contact read permissions), you can use the PAssist OSS version of PAssist from outside the Play Store:
- Install from IzzyOnDroid
- Download and install APK from Github
Defines the contact of your operations center sending alarms via SMS. The SMS received from any phone number of this contact are supervised by PAssist.
PAssist also supports operations centers using numeric and alphanumeric short code SMS numbers. Numeric short codes are currently only supported for the following countries:
- Australia (AU) - as of release 2.18.1 and S2MSP release 3.5.2
- Belgium (BE)
- Botswana (BW)
- Brazil (BR)
- Canada (CA)
- Chile (CL)
- Denmark (DK)
- Dominican Republic (DO)
- Finland (FI)
- France (FR)
- Germany (DE)
- Greece (GR)
- Hungary (HU)
- India (IN)
- Indonesia (ID)
- Ireland (IE)
- Italy (IT)
- Morocco (MA)
- Nepal (NP)
- Netherlands (NL)
- New Zealand (NZ)
- Nigeria (NG)
- Norway (NO)
- Panama (PA)
- Singapore (SG)
- Spain (ES)
- Sweden (SE)
- Switzerland (CH)
- Turkey (TR)
- USA (US)
- United Kingdom (GB)
Alphanumeric short codes are supported in any country.
Numeric short codes can be defined as normal phone numbers in the operations centers contact. Ensure that no separator characters (like '-') are used.
As contacts in Android cannot contain alphanumeric short code phone numbers, they can be configured in the contact field "Company". If the operations centers uses several alphanumeric short code phone numbers, they can be comma separated in the contacts "Company" field. Any regular phone numbers stored in the contacts field "Company" will be ignored.
Be aware that confirmation replies are not possible if alphanumeric short code SMS numbers are used.
Method how to acknowledge alerts received from the operations center.
| Method | Reply channel | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Disabled | - | no reply |
| SMS with static text | SMS | SMS reply with a static text |
| SMS with dynamic text | SMS | SMS reply with a dynamic text (extracted from the received SMS) |
| Fact24 ENS+ | Internet | Fact24 ENS+ WEB workflow with (fixed reply: "CONFIRMED within 5 minutes" |
Defines the static text to send back as the confirmation reply to your operations center.
Regular expression pattern with one group to extract a confirmation value from
the received SMS
that will be used as the confirmation reply and sent back to your operations center.
WARNING: If the pattern cannot extract a value from the received SMS, no acknowledgment is sent
back to your operations center!
New alerts are automatically confirmed if received within the defined time window after the last alarm was received, while the app is still in a confirmed alert state. This feature ensures you can stay focused on your current case even with recurring alerts. If set to 0 (default), alarms are never auto confirmed.
Regular expression pattern to identify SMS messages
to be ignored.
If empty, SMS filtering is disabled.
WARNING: Be careful, if the pattern is not well designed and triggers for a real alarm, you won't be alerted!
Defines the ringtone that is used to alert for on-call alarms.
Defines one specific or all of your calendars, that should be used to look for on-call events.
Defines a Regular expression pattern (case insensitive) to match the titles of your calendar events, which should be considered for your on-call duties.
Defines whether partner contacts are extracted from on-call duty events.
Defines a Regular expression pattern to
extract partner contacts from on-call duty events.
The partner contacts are extracted from the notes field of on-call duty events.
There can be several partner contacts in the event notes.
The extracted partner contacts are interpreted as contact nicknames.
Time in seconds to enable/disable the on-call state before and after the calender event. The default is 300 seconds (five minutes).
Selects whether to monitor signal strength. If the battery level drops below 10%, the polling frequency for monitoring will be reduced in favour of a longer battery life.
Defines the lowest accepted signal strength level.
Defines the amount of seconds for which the signal strength must be lower than the minimal expected level before a low signal alarm is raised. With filtering you can reduce false alarms. The filter can be set between 0 (filtering off) and 10 minutes, with a default of 30 seconds. Be aware: With higher values, it takes longer until you are notified of a dead spot. Even with filtering enabled, the airplane mode is detected immediately.
Defines whether an alert for low signal strength creates a notification or not. The phone also indicates low signal strength through a vibration pattern, regardless of this setting.
For dual SIM phones you can select the subscription for which the signal strength is supervised.
Defines whether the battery level is supervised or not.
Defines the minimal battery level in percentage (between 10% - 50%). If the current battery level falls below this minimal level, an alert notification is created. Independent of this minimal battery level, whenever the battery level is in the danger zone (below 10%) the polling frequency for PAssist checks (e.g. signal strength) is lowered to minimize the power consumption.
Enable or disable the test alarm feature.
Regular expression pattern to identify SMS alarm messages as test alarms (case
sensitive).
WARNING: Be careful, if the pattern is not well designed and triggers for a real alarm, you won't be alerted!
The regular expression can define a group to extract the test context (for example the name of the system) out of the SMS. As an example the following regular expression could handle test alarms from two different systems 'Helios' and 'Lunar':
^Test alarm for system (Helios|Lunar).*
Test alarms of each group can be supervised individually.
Defines which of the available test contexts should be supervised.
Defines the daily time for checking whether the test alarms have been received recently.
Defines the time window in which the test alarm must have been received before the check time to be accepted.
Defines the weekdays on which the test alarms are checked.
Defines the ringtone that is used to alert for missing test alarms.
Time when day/night profile starts.
Defines whether PAssist should control the ringtone volume during on-call duty or not. The desired ringtone volumes can be defined for the day and night profile separately. If activated, the ringtone volume is automatically restored to the former value, when on-call duty is finished.
Enable "Minimize at night" to reduce power drain at night by reducing the frequency of signal strength monitoring checks.
Currently, the following languages are supported in PAssist:
- English
- German
- French
- Italian
Translation support for any additional language is warmly welcomed - just get in contact with me. PAssist is using Lokalise to maintain language translations.
PAssist is Open-Source and available under Apache-2.0 license. If you find PAssist useful and use it on a regular basis for your on-call duties, a voluntary donation is warmly welcome.
The use of PAssist is at your own risk. The author assumes no liability for malfunctions of the application. Any warranty claims are excluded.
PAssist is developed with Android Studio with Java 17. The current Android target SDK is 37 (Android 17-Cinnamon Bun) and the minimum SDK is 26 (Android 8.0-Oreo).
Feedback, bug reports or feature requests are very welcome. You can send an email to frimtec@gmx.ch or open an issue on GitHub.
App language translations maintained with the great localization platform Lokalise.