Emergency app for FP Open

[Lluvia]

Hello,
I’m looking for an emergency or panic button app that works on FP Open and can do the following:

• accessible as easily as possible, e.g. from the lock screen or by pressing a button
• sends a SMS with GPS location to a set of trusted contacts
• optionally starts a phone call with trusted contact
• optionally allows constant tracking of the phone’s location (similar to Google’s Trusted Contacts app)

I already tried a few apps, but they either didn’t do what I wanted or didn’t work on FP Open.

[Lluvia]

I found out that at least Samsung phones have the emergency sms feature (activated by pressing the power button multiple times) built-in. It just needs to be activated and configured in the settings.
I guess this is not a default android feature? I couldn’t find it in the FP Open settings. Does it exist for the regular Fairphone OS?

[urs_lesse]

There are various apps that provide similar functionality:

F-Droid Store: https://search.f-droid.org/?q=emergency
Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=emergency%20message

I have no experience with any of these. When it comes to your question whether it works on Fairphone Open OS, all you need to look for is what Android version each app requires. Fairphone Open OS is currently on Android 7.1.2. If an app requires this version (or a lower number), it should work on the FP2. Actually, you can install apps requiring higher Android versions as well if you are willing to install an alternative operating system on your FP2 (LineageOS).

[Lluvia]

Thanks for the links and the information. Unfortunately most of the apps don’t provide the functionality I’m looking for, especially accessibility on the lock screen.

In the cases where the app didn’t work it was mostly due to missing Google Apps and not because of the Android version.

I found one that at least can send an SMS with GPS data from the lock screen, which is “Call for help”. However it only works with en_US locale (at least it didn’t work with de_DE), because otherwise it screws up the coordinates in the Google Maps link (most likely due to the different decimal separator). Luckily there’s an Xposed module that allows locale settings per app.