Why am I not getting notifications on my phone?
SimpleAccess uses AWS (Amazon Web Services) and SendGrid (email to text) to send notifications to your device. Notification data flows in one direction (from SimpleAccess, outbound to your device). Neither AWS nor SendGrid guarantees the order of messages that are received. According to AWS, "Delivery of notifications is a 'best effort', not guaranteed." SimpleAccess will send and initiate the notification as soon as it is triggered, but we do not have control over when they actually arrive on the phone or in what order.
As a metaphor, think of notifications like mailing a letter. We send your mail (notifications) to your local Post Office (Notification Service). From there, your mail is distributed to a mailman (AWS/SendGrid) to be brought to your home (device). For the most part, your mail (notifications) is delivered to your house without any issues, but occasionally your mail gets lost, or there is bad weather and the mail is late, or the mailman accidentally neglects to leave you some mail. This is essentially what is happening when we send notifications and they arrive on your device in non-sequential order, get delayed, or one is not received. There is so much data being transmitted among these channels that the information can sometimes become a little convoluted.
- We send notifications to your device based on the settings configured in your account.
- Notifications are received by the data stream network and subsequently sent to AWS/SendGrid.
- AWS/SendGrid receive the notifications and proceed to send them to your device.
- 4) Notifications are received on your device
A couple things of note to help further understand this process:
Unfortunately, once we send out the notifications, the remaining variables are out of our hands and we cannot promise when the notifications will be received on your device (indicated by the dotted line in the image above).
We use UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) which is linked to the time zone in your device. So if you are on vacation, the notifications will be in whatever time zone your phone/device is in, and not in the time zone where your lock device is located.
For example: If your home is in Florida, EST (Eastern Standard), and you have a notification event occurring at 3 AM EST, but you are vacationing in Colorado, MST (Mountain Standard), the notification for this lock will indicate 1 AM, which is in fact 3 AM EST.
Your phone will need to have a data plan that is supported by a network to receive notifications.
Also, depending on your network strength, the notifications may take longer to receive.
If you are confused by the notifications that you are receiving, please make sure to check your lock's Event History and Notification History - the portal will always tell you what has happened at your lock before the last heartbeat interval.
If the Event or Notification History is incorrect according to the settings you have set up, then there may be an issue (which SimpleAccess Support will gladly troubleshoot for you).
If you are not receiving notifications, please confirm the following:
- That your lock has connected to wifi and had a heartbeat interval since the event occurred.
- Your cell carrier has been configured appropriately in the Notifications and Account settings.
- Your Cell and/or email carrier is delivering the message and handling the request appropriately.
- Is your phone off/out of service / out of data?
- If it's an email notification have you checked your spam folder?
- Have you ensured the emails being sent from SimpleAccess <donotreply@SimpleAccess.com> have not been blacklisted?
Have you configured your account appropriately for alerts/notifications and successfully set them up (or set them up at all)? Please see our other article on Notifications to ensure this configuration.