Custom sounds

Today I’m happy to announce the release of Pushover 3.7 for Android, iPhone/iPad, and Desktop with custom sound support!

While Pushover has long included 21 different sounds that can be selected per-message through our API, a common feature request was the ability to play custom notification sounds stored on a user’s device. This was technically possible on Android but there was no ability to do it on iPhone/iPad, and on Android there was no way to choose between different sounds on a user’s device through the API.

Recently Apple added the ability to play notification sounds that were not bundled with the app, and added support for playing MP3 files. With the release of Pushover 3.7 today, you can now upload custom sounds through our website and have them played on your devices without having to copy sound files to each device. Developers using our API can even play those sounds on other users’ devices that they send to, allowing applications to have distinct notification sounds shared by all of their users.

This functionality is available on our Desktop client, all Android devices, and iPhone/iPad devices running iOS 14.

Uploading Sounds

To get started, head over to your dashboard and you’ll now see a new section “Your Custom Sounds”.

Click Upload Sound and then enter a name, description, and select an MP3 file from your computer. Note that this name is the one that will be specified through our API with the sound parameter. For Pushover for Teams administrators, you can optionally share the sound file with your whole team and its applications.

Also note that sound files must be in MP3 format and are limited to 500 kilobytes in size, and for iOS devices, cannot be longer than 30 seconds or they will not play. If you have an MP3 that needs to be trimmed in size, we recommend the free utility Ringer. If it’s still larger than 500Kb, we recommend using a utility like MP3Smaller to reduce the sound quality. Since these are just short sounds played over a phone’s small speaker, the sound quality is not that important.

Once you have a sound file uploaded, and your devices have been updated to Pushover 3.7, try sending it to your device through our dashboard by selecting it as the Sound parameter.

Uploaded sounds are also available to be chosen as your default normal- and high-priority sounds in our apps:

I hope you enjoy this new feature. Pushover 3.7 is available now for Android, iPhone/iPad, and Desktop.

Free trial now 30 days instead of 7

Over the years we’ve heard from some users that our 7-day trial was not long enough to really test out Pushover. Sometimes users would install the app, signup, and then forget about it, only to return to it days later and find that their trial was about to expire. Or users integrating Pushover with a custom IoT project would need a few more days to get their software properly setup to send out notifications.

Today we’re happy to announce that we’re changing our free trial period for Android, iOS, and Desktop platforms to 30 days. As soon as a device on a particular platform is added to a Pushover account, the 30-day trial period for that platform begins. Each of our Android, iOS, and Desktop platforms can be tried out independently or together.

If you need more time on your free trial before buying, just let us know and we’ll be happy to extend your trial period.

We hope this lets more users try out Pushover and see how easy it is to integrate and use. We have some exciting things coming up this year for Pushover, so stay tuned!

April 15-16 DDoS Attack

On April 15th at approximately 23:30 CDT, Pushover’s API servers came under a DNS amplification Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack which caused them to be unreachable by their IPv4 addresses, though they were still reachable over IPv6.

This attack persisted through the morning of the 16th. At 01:55 we began rerouting traffic for api.pushover.net through a 3rd party DDoS mitigation company and we are once again receiving API requests (IPv4 and IPv6).

Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to receive e-mail notifications through our E-Mail Gateway for legacy USERKEY@api.pushover.net addresses, though our @pomail.net addresses are working.

At no point during this attack were any servers compromised or any data exposed. This was purely a resource exhaustion attack intended to take our service offline.

We are continuing to monitor the attack and are taking steps to mitigate its effect on our service. We will update this post with any further news.

Update 2020-04-16 16:30 CDT: The attack is still persisting, but as we are routing our API and dashboard through our 3rd party DDoS mitigation service, we are continuing to receive notification requests and send them out mostly without incident. We will continue to provide more updates here as needed.

iOS Critical Alerts

A new version of our iPhone/iPad app is available today that adds support for Apple’s Critial Alerts.

Added in iOS 12, Critical Alerts are special notifications that can bypass the device’s mute switch and Do Not Disturb settings to generate audible alerts in emergency situations. This functionality is only available to applications that have applied to and been approved by Apple. We’ve been applying since the day Critical Alerts were announced at Apple’s developer conference in 2018 and Pushover has finally been approved.

Pushover for iOS now supports generating Critical Alerts for your most important messages, such as security camera alerts. Our Android application has had similar functionality since 2013 by optionally playing notification sounds as alarms, bypassing the device’s mute switch.

Critical Alerts are not enabled by default, and can be enabled in the Pushover app’s settings menu. The first time the “Critical Alerts for high-priority” option is enabled, you’ll need to approve a dialog from iOS allowing Pushover to generate Critical Alerts:

Since Critical Alerts bypass your device’s mute switch, they do not play sounds at your device’s current volume setting. You’ll need to choose a volume at which to play Critlcal Alerts from Pushover, and these go to eleven.

Quick Do Not Disturb Mode

Today we’re releasing new versions of our Android, iPhone/iPad, and Desktop apps with a quick Do Not Disturb button. When pressed, you can quickly choose a time period in minutes, hours, or days, and all notifications for your devices will be silenced during that period. Once the time period is up, your notifications will resume automatically.

We’ve heard from many users that use Pushover to receive alerts from network monitors that when things break, they often break loudly with many alerts coming in a short amount of time. This new Do Not Disturb functionality can quickly silence new notifications while you work on resolving the problem. Once the Pushover app is opened, it will display all messages received during your Do Not Disturb period as usual.

For Android users, we’ve also added this button to our home-screen widget. The default time period used on the widget is the last time period selected inside the app.

For those needing Do Not Disturb on a regular schedule (such as overnight or on weekends), our Quiet Hours functionality continues to be available to set custom schedules.