Red Rocket v2.2.0

Android 8.0 and up · AGPL-3.0

When the alert comes, your people already know.

Red Rocket watches for emergency alerts on your phone. When one matches a scenario you set up, it texts the people you picked and tracks who answers.

You're not going to write a message during an earthquake. You write it now, once, while nothing's happening. Red Rocket sends it, whether or not your phone's in your hand.

Detection

It runs eight checks before it sends anything.

Firing is deliberately hard. A false alert does more damage than a missed one, and a news app using the word tsunami shouldn't be enough to text five people.

Test broadcasts stop it dead rather than lowering a score. Block phrases beat keywords, so "this is a test" cancels the match outright. It also weighs where the alert came from, because a system cell broadcast isn't the same thing as a push from a news app.

AMBER alerts pass through like anything else. If you want one to trigger a scenario, add it as a keyword.

Contacts

Different people, different message, one trigger.

Each scenario holds groups, and each group has its own message. Family gets the one about the spare key. Coworkers get the one about the shift. Both go out at once, off the same alert.

Messages go out in parallel. If the network starts failing it drops to sequential, then to a retry mode that keeps going until everything lands. You can tell it to never give up.

Then it listens. Contacts reply with one digit, and the dashboard shows who's answered and who hasn't.

Coverage

It doesn't assume you're at home.

Alerts get worded differently from one country to the next, so the presets cover 14 disaster categories with keywords in 22 languages across 35 countries. Tap one to add the whole category, and tap it again to drop it.

It reads your region and dial code from the device, but you can set them yourself if you've traveled or your SIM says one country while you're in another.

Permissions

What it asks your phone for, and why.

An app that texts people while you're not looking should be able to justify every permission it asks for. Here's the list, straight from the manifest in the APK above.

Two are optional and it works fine without them. Contacts just saves you typing numbers in by hand. Location only does anything if you turn on enrichment, and that's off until you do.

Data

What leaves your phone.

There's no account, no server and no analytics. Your contacts, scenarios and messages sit on the device and don't go anywhere.

Two things do go out. One is a version check that says nothing about you, and the other one is optional.

Event Horizon Web is a separate app that maps what's happening and where. Red Rocket works fine on its own and doesn't need it, but if you turn on enrichment the two split the job, so Red Rocket texts your people while Event Horizon tells you what you're looking at.

Enrichment is off until you turn it on. With it on, an alert makes the app read your rough location and ask Event Horizon what's happening within 15 km. That request carries the coordinates and nothing else, so no name, no ID, no contacts and no alert text go with it. The answer isn't stored. Leave enrichment off and no location ever leaves your phone.

Updates

Red Rocket won't nag you.

It notifies you for three things: a live alert, a reply, and sending status. Update notices aren't on that list on purpose. A notification you learn to swipe away is one you'll swipe away on the night it matters.

It checks quietly when you next open it and shows a small banner if there's a newer build. If you want it to update itself like a store app, use Obtainium.

Method

Written with AI, held to a spec.

Red Rocket was written with AI assistance: Claude, driven by me, working inside an engineering specification I wrote and enforce. It's worth mentioning rather than burying it, because this is an app people might lean on during a bad night.

That doesn't mean a prompt, a generated app and a release. Seven documents fix the rules before any code gets written: what the app isn't allowed to become, the eight detection steps and the order they run in, and a list of things an eager assistant may never "improve". I review the diffs and run the checklist on a real phone, screen off, radio asleep, because an emulator can't tell you what happens then.

The write-up includes the parts that aren't flattering: automated test coverage is thin, there's no CI, and one person reviews everything. Every number in it is countable in the repo, and the commands to count them are in the document.

How Red Rocket was built