In the UK and the emergency announcement didn’t fire on my Sailfish phone. Fired on my friend’s Apple and on my work’s Android, but not my Sailfish 4.5 - was wondering why?
i received no warning on a 10iii sporting SFOS 4.5.18 with a 4G connection on vodafone.
I live in Spain (mostly) but am on GiffGaff (UK network) and I also did not receive the emergency text. My SIM card is currently in my original Jolla1
Didn’t work for me either on 4.5.0.19, 4G on Xperia 10 III.
I thought it was supposed to work on all modern phones/OSs as an EU requirement?
Of the 4 mobile phones in the house, only 1 reacted to the UK cell broadcast.
iPhone (IOS 16.4.1) (Vodafone - contract) went off
iPhone (IOS 16.4.1) (Three - contract) - silent & no notification (4G connection? - Extreme and Severe alerts enable, Wi-FI calling enabled)
Sony XPeria (Sailfish OS 4.5.0.19) (Vodafone - Contract) - silent & no notification (4G connection)
Cosmo Communicator (UB Ports/Ubuntu Touch - OTA-25) (EE - prepaid) - silent & no notification
For further info - Xperia 10 III running 4.5.0.19 on device adaptation 1.0.1.20
My Jolla C didn’t alert. I thought it might be because I had ‘prefer 3g’ but this says it needs iOS or Android:
Wife’s iPhone 8 with a 3 SIM didn’t alert. That seems be be a failure by 3.
No it doesn’t. It says that if it does have either of those, there are minimum versions that apply.
Well, it might mean that.
Has anybody using SFOS actually got this alert - noise and message?
Is each country’s alert warning system using the same tech stack / protocols etc?
Or is it the case that UK uses one protocol, Spain another etc?
I thought it was all the same. Otherwise phone OSs, like IOS which is available throughout the world, would surely have to support large numbers of different protocols to ensure their phone or OS would work with emergency alerts across all countries that use them.
Which maybe tends to suggest that this feature is not available on SFOS at all?
BBC: Emergency alert test fails to sound on some phones, so it seems it is not SFOS only problem.
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Indeed, no phones on 2G or 3G would have received the alert, nor IOS or Android phones with older OSs below the minimum version required. Some on the ‘Three’ network also did not get it, even though their phones were the right spec. It would be nice to know from @Jolla whether the alerts are actually supposed to work on SFOS, and from which version, or that simply the feature is not implemented at all.
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If the feature is not implemented at all on SFOS, I’ll just have to turn on my vacuum tube wireless and tune it to the Home Service on Long Wave to find out when I’m going to meet my doom instead 
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This piece, by Frazer Rhodes, describes the background - both technical
and political - to the UK Emergency Alert system and (in part 2) why it
only works with 4g/5g:
On another forum (actually, usenet) somebody said:
“So far I’ve only heard of one successful alert on a non-Android and non-
IOS phone, which was a cheap candy-bar Nokia on Tesco PAYG.”
Public warning broadcasts are a base LTE feature, not something from the IMS(VoLTE) subsystem.
Thes type of wild guessing helps nobody.
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According to my contact on usenet:
Despite much grandstanding, it’s barely been customised by the UK at all,
beyond declaring that they’ve renamed the “Presidential Alert” level to
“Government Alert”.It’s a bog-standard implementation of ETSI TS 102 900 (Google that if you want
to read the original doc). Any handset produced in the last few years - smart
or otherwise - ought to have the capability, alhough I’m not sure if it has
ever been made mandatory.
and
So every handset /will/ have /received/ them - Cell Broadcast has been a part
of the basic spec since the days of GSM, and has carried forward through the
subsequent generations. (Each successive generation has enhanced it somewhat -
longer maximum message lengths, that sort of thing, but the fundamental
capability has remained unchanged.)Cell Broadcast messags have a channel number (aka message identifier)
associated with them (think very much like Teletext page numbers). Certain
channels numbers may - through convention/standardisation - come to have
special meaning. That’s really all that EU-ALERT etc. changed back in 2018 -
the agreement that ‘if a handset receives a Cell Broadcast on channel 4370, it
should beep loudly and display it with a flashing “ALERT” banner’.Probably, the handsets received them and then took the default behaviour of
“if I don’t know what to do with it, I discard it.” That would be the default
for any ID above 1000 (broadcast channels above 1000 all being reserved for
‘special purposes’ - for example, there is a broadcast channel for sending
updated GPS almanac data (1003), and a range (4096 to 4351) used for sending
SIM updates (the automated push data that is the reason you don’t need to
manually enter things like SMS service centre numbers any more) and so on.)
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12 September “Call broadcast emergency” in Italy, Sailfish 4.5.0.21 - Xperia 10 III dual sim, TIM contract. The message appeared but the cell phone did not ring but only vibrated. When I unlocked my phone the message disappeared. For me it is fine.
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