How to change emergency alert settings on your phone

These days’ smartphones include emergency tools built right in. When the unexpected occurs, it’s not always simple (or possible) to notify your loved ones, but thanks to Emergency SOS, you can relax.

On your phone, you can sign up to get emergency, government, and public safety alerts about risks to public safety, severe weather, missing children, natural disasters, and more. You could only receive an alert if you’re in an affected area because not all alerts are distributed equally.

You can change the settings on your phone to allow test alerts or turn on or off particular notifications. For both iOS and Android phones, we provide instructions.

Emergency alerts on iPhones

When it comes to emergency alert settings on your iPhone, you have a few general options:

Navigate to Settings > Notifications and select Government Alerts from the list.
Here, you can activate or deactivate AMBER Alerts. When a child is kidnapped or goes missing, this notice is sent out. Toggle the AMBER Alerts button to the right to enable or the left to disable it.
Several options are available when you tap on Emergency Alerts. You can disable Always Play Sound or turn off Emergency Alerts so that no sound will be played when your phone is in silent mode. Emergency Alerts can be enabled or disabled by sliding the toggle next to it to the right or left.

Public Safety Alerts is the following choice. Public safety notifications are often less serious than alerts for an immediate threat, according to FEMA.
On occasion, the government issues test alerts. On your iPhone, the option is by default off, but you may turn it on by turning on Test Alerts.
Presidential alerts are required and unavoidable.

Emergency alerts on Android phones

Your options for emergency alert settings may vary depending on the type of your Android phone. The types of alerts you can choose to receive are more flexible on newer phones:

Select Wireless emergency notifications under Settings > Safety & emergency.

Here, you can activate or deactivate AMBER Alerts. When a child is kidnapped or goes missing, this notice is sent out.

Threats to your life and property are classified as either extreme or severe, with extreme threats being more serious.

Public safety announcements give more details on what to do in response to one of the other alerts.

The choice to enable or disable alert tests might be available.

Presidential alerts are required and unavoidable.