Delivery & receipts
What actually happens between "your site sent an event" and "a phone buzzed" — and how FlowAlert proves each step.
The journey
- Event received — your integration POSTs to
/v1/events - Rules match — every enabled routing rule is checked; matches decide who's alerted (overlapping rules never double-notify anyone)
- Notifications sent — a push goes to each recipient's registered devices
- The phone confirms — the FlowAlert app reports back the moment the push actually lands on the device: a delivery receipt
Every alert's full journey is visible in Dashboard → Alerts — expand a row to see each person's status.
What the statuses mean
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Sending… | Queued, on its way |
| Sent | Handed to the push network |
| On their phone | The device itself confirmed receipt — the strongest signal |
| Held — quiet hours | The recipient's quiet hours are active: the alert is visible in their app now, and the push fires automatically when the window ends. Held, never lost. |
| Not delivered | Push failed — most commonly the app isn't installed / never signed in, or the push token expired after a reinstall |
| Acknowledged | A person tapped Acknowledge (see Acknowledgements) |
Receipts are a positive-only signal: "On their phone" is proof, but its absence proves nothing — older app versions don't report receipts, and a phone that's off reports late. FlowAlert never marks something failed just because a receipt hasn't arrived.
Reachability — can alerts reach this person right now?
Dashboard → Subscribers shows a live reachability signal per person, built from devices and recent receipts:
| Signal | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Reachable | Their phone confirmed an alert recently |
| No phone | Never signed in on the mobile app — alerts can't reach them |
| Notifications off | Their device has notifications disabled for FlowAlert |
| Not confirming | Their phone used to confirm but has gone silent while alerts kept being sent — often the OS battery-killing the app |
| Quiet week / Unconfirmed | Nothing sent recently, or an app version that doesn't report receipts — neutral, not an alarm |
When in doubt, ask them to run "Test my alerts" in the mobile app's settings — it sends a self-test push and diagnoses the path end-to-end.