Accident Sniffer is on the App Store: set up alerts for your suburbs in five minutes

Accident Sniffer is now on the App Store for iPhone. If you have been waiting for the listing, here is how to get from download to useful alerts in about five minutes, and the few choices that decide whether the alerts help you or just make noise.

Most of that five minutes is one decision: which suburbs you cover. The rest is tapping through.

What the app does, in one paragraph

It watches live reports from people driving Perth roads and sends you a push notification when an incident turns up inside the suburbs you have chosen, or within 5 km of them. Each alert names the road and suburb, shows your distance and estimated drive time, says whether the incident is still live or has cleared, and shows how many drivers have confirmed it. One tap opens a route in Apple Maps, Google Maps or Waze. It covers the Perth metropolitan area.

That is the whole product. It does not dispatch for you and it is not an emergency service. It gives you a location and some context, and you decide whether a truck goes.

Step 1: Download and sign up

Search for Accident Sniffer on the App Store, or use the App Store listing directly from your iPhone. Install it, open it and sign up when it asks.

The first 14 days are free and you do not need to enter a card. When the trial ends your access pauses on its own. Nothing is charged automatically. If you want to keep it, you upgrade inside the app for A$29 a month including GST.

Step 2: Choose your coverage suburbs

This is the step that matters. You pick the suburbs you want to hear about, and you get incidents inside them or within 5 km of each one. Anything outside stays quiet.

If you leave your coverage empty, you get every alert across the Perth metro. That sounds generous, and for a few days it is interesting. After that most operators start swiping alerts away without reading them, and a habit of ignoring notifications is very hard to undo. Start narrow.

A sensible first list:

1. Start from where the truck actually sits between jobs, not from your business address.
2. Add the suburbs you would honestly send a truck to in the traffic you normally drive in.
3. Favour suburbs that touch a major corridor: Mitchell, Kwinana, Reid, Roe, Tonkin, Leach or Great Eastern.
4. Remember the 5 km buffer. Adding two neighbouring suburbs often covers the same ground twice.
5. Leave anything you would not go to at 5pm off the list for now.

We wrote a longer method for this in Setting up coverage zones that actually pay, including why a circle around your yard is usually the wrong shape for a city as long and thin as Perth.

Night cover is a different list

If you work nights, your realistic reach after midnight is much wider than at peak hour. Some operators widen their suburbs before a night shift and trim them back in the morning. Others leave coverage empty overnight and narrow it again by day. Either is reasonable, as long as you are making the change on purpose. Running the night shift goes into how the job changes after dark.

Step 3: Allow notifications

When the app asks to send notifications, allow it. Without that permission there are no alerts, and this is the most common reason a new install seems to do nothing.

Once notifications are on, alerts arrive like any other iPhone notification, whether the app is open, in the background or closed. You do not need to keep it on screen.

If you tapped Don’t Allow by mistake, open the iPhone Settings app, find Accident Sniffer in the list of apps, tap Notifications and switch Allow Notifications on.

Two phone settings are worth checking while you are there:

• Focus modes. A Sleep or Driving focus can hold notifications back. If you want alerts during those times, add Accident Sniffer to the apps allowed through.
• Lock screen and banners. Make sure alerts show on the lock screen and play a sound, so you notice one with the phone face down on the dash.

Step 4: Get your maps app ready

Every alert opens a ready-to-go route in Apple Maps, Google Maps or Waze with one tap. Use whichever your drivers already know. The point is to skip the step where someone reads a road name and works out where it actually is, so the app should be installed, signed in and familiar before the first real alert arrives.

Step 5: Read your first alert properly

When the first alert comes through, take a minute to read the whole card rather than reacting to the notification banner. It tells you more than the headline does:

• Road and suburb, so you know where it is without decoding a description.
• Distance and estimated drive time from you, which is the honest test of whether it is your job.
• Live or cleared status, so you are not driving to something that has already gone.
• Driver confirmations, which tell you how many people have reported the same incident.

A single report with no confirmations is worth watching, not always worth moving for. Several confirmations on a freeway in your zone is a different picture. The judgement is still yours, and it should be.

Using the trial well

Fourteen days is enough to learn whether your coverage is right, if you treat it as a test rather than a free fortnight. A simple way to do that:

1. For each alert, note the suburb and whether you would have sent a truck.
2. At the end of the first week, drop any suburb where the answer was always no.
3. Add one neighbouring suburb you were unsure about, and watch it for the second week.
4. At the end of the trial, compare the alerts you acted on with the jobs you heard about through your usual channels.

That last comparison is the useful one. Most operators already have a scanner, a group chat or two, and a few repeat customers. The question is not whether alerts replace those, but which gaps they fill. We looked at where each of those channels tends to fail in Why scanning and group chats quietly cost you jobs.

Common questions after setup

I am getting too many alerts

Your coverage is too wide, or empty. Remove the suburbs you have not acted on. Because of the 5 km buffer, removing a suburb in the middle of a cluster may make less difference than removing one on the edge.

I am not getting any alerts

Check notifications are allowed in the iPhone Settings app, check a Focus mode is not holding them, and check that your coverage actually includes suburbs with busy roads. A quiet residential pocket can go a long time without an incident.

How do I cancel?

If you never upgrade, there is nothing to cancel, because the trial simply pauses. If you have subscribed, billing is handled by Apple: open Settings, tap your name, then Subscriptions, or use the Manage subscription button in the app. You keep access until the end of the period you have already paid for.