You know before
the tone drops.
Your members see the call when your dispatcher does.
Your members can get the call about twenty seconds before the tone goes out — then hear it announced, problem and address, on whatever screen they can actually reach.
Half the time you can’t get to your phone
It’s in your pants pocket, under your bunker gear, and you’re not getting at it. That’s the whole reason for the other six screens — the same live call on the wrist, the dash, the rig and the wall, never disagreeing about what’s happening.
iPhone & Android
iPhone · AndroidThe live call board, full incident detail with units and CAD notes, and one tap to respond with your destination and ETA already attached.
Apple Watch
iPhoneA haptic on the wrist the instant the page hits. Read the call, see who else is coming, and commit — without fighting your way into a pocket that is under two layers of gear.
Garmin Fenix & Instinct
iPhone · AndroidPlenty of responders wear a Garmin instead — rugged, workable with gloves on, weeks of battery wherever the search goes. The call comes to the wrist and you can respond from it, relayed through your phone.
The car’s own screen
iPhone · CarPlayNot a call list you read at a stoplight. Tap once on CarPlay and you’re responding, with turn-by-turn already running to the scene or the station — and new CAD notes read aloud over the nav audio while you drive.
Your lock screen, the whole run
iPhoneThe same way your phone tracks a flight or a delivery, it tracks the call — priority, type, address, a running clock and how many are coming, sitting on the lock screen until it clears. No unlocking, no hunting for the app. On Android, a home-screen widget carries the same call.
The tablet in the rig
iPadAn iPad mounted in the rig that signs in as the apparatus, not a person, and stays signed in. It can be set up on every rig at once. On dispatch it pulls up everything for that call automatically.
Station Wall Board
Any TVThe screen on the apparatus floor: live calls, unit status, weather and wildfire conditions, and a full-screen incident command takeover when a call drops. Runs on a set-top box or a small computer behind any TV with an HDMI port — no control unit, no install, no screen to buy from us.
Respond in the wild
Turnout time starts before the tone
Most apps give you a ringtone when dispatch tones out. Respond stages it — a heads-up the moment a call is put in your district, the confirmed page when a unit of yours is attached — and announces both out loud, per member.
Pre-Alert
The moment a call is put in your district, it’s on your members’ phones — before any unit of yours is attached to it. Across 29,000 calls in a dispatch center that gap runs a median of 20 seconds — against a median turnout of 67. Early information, so it’s opt-in per member, and most leave it on.
Dispatch
The confirmed page, sent when one of your units is put on the call. This is the one everybody gets — with the tone your department picks, from a library of familiar-sounding pager tones.
Spoken aloud
“Structure fire — 123 Main Street.” The dispatch is voiced on arrival, generated per call. You know what you’re going to before you’ve got your socks on.
One stage breaks through. On purpose.
Plenty of apps can override Do Not Disturb. The harder part is not doing it constantly. Only the confirmed dispatch gets that treatment — never the pre-alert, never a neighboring call — so when your phone ignores silent mode, it means something.
Off duty means off duty
One switch and you’re off the page, or snooze it for an hour, eight hours, or until you turn it back on. Not a settings screen of call types to untick one by one, and not silencing the whole phone and missing the next one.
Neighboring calls, if you want them
Your department already tracks its neighbors’ calls on the board. Members can opt in to alerts for those, rule by rule — off by default, and never critical.
Where the 20 seconds comes from: 29,459 calls through a dispatch center between January and September 2026, measuring the gap between a call being placed in a district and the first paging unit being attached to it — median 20 seconds, 47 at the 90th percentile. Median turnout across the same calls, from that assignment to a unit rolling, was 67 seconds. That is the window pre-alert makes available to a member; whether it turns into a faster turnout is up to whoever is putting their boots on.
By the time your boots are on, there are three more people in the bay
So the question isn’t who got here first. It’s what’s still coming, and how far out — whether to take the utility now, or wait the ninety seconds for someone to roll the engine.
“Responding” on its own doesn’t answer that. The board splits everyone into three groups that add up — rolling, at station, on scene — each with a live drive time, so you can commit to a plan while you’re still getting dressed.
- Live positions on the incident map — every responder as a moving pin, not a static list of names
- ETAs from where you actually are — routed live, not a typed-in guess and not your home address. At the grocery store in district still counts.
- Rolling, at station, on scene — three groups that add up, worded the same on the phone, the watch, the car screen and the wall, so no two screens disagree about who is where
- Automatic arrival — pull up to the station or the scene and it marks you there and stops tracking, without a second tap
- Apparatus on the map too — rig-mounted devices report position, so the board shows units and people together
Your members are using their own phones
You turn location on once, and that’s the whole deal: from the moment you tap respond, Respond follows you until you arrive — or for twenty minutes, whichever comes first. Then it stops on its own. Not when someone remembers to switch it off, and not until the officer closes the call.
Between calls there’s no window open at all. A volunteer’s phone isn’t a fleet asset, and this isn’t a tracking app that happens to do dispatch.
Your radio runs the fireground.
Respond runs the drive to it.
No app fixes no signal. If your phone has nothing when the tone drops, you hear it on the radio like always — that’s what radios and pagers are for, and Respond doesn’t pretend otherwise. What it does is make sure you’re carrying the call before you lose signal.
You leave with the call already on the phone
The page doesn’t just wake the app. It pulls the whole incident down while you’re still on station wi‑fi or standing in your kitchen — type, priority, address, coordinates. Most apps wait until you open them, and if you open yours halfway up a canyon there’s nothing there.
No signal? Tap anyway.
Hit responding in a dead spot and Respond hangs on to it. The moment you get a bar back, it goes through — with the time you actually tapped it, so your times come out right.
Honest status, never frozen
When a member goes dark, the board says “last seen 07:52” instead of leaving a stale ETA ticking. Nobody shows as “two minutes out” forever.
The information you’d otherwise be asking for over the radio
Caution & address notes
Dispatcher caution notes plus your own officers’ notes on an address — the gate code, the aggressive dog, the access quirk — surfaced automatically when a call comes in there.
CAD notes worth reading
Machine chatter — unit status lines, timestamps, codes — is filtered out on the watch, the car screen and the lock screen, so what you see and hear is what a human actually typed.
When the call leaves the pavement
Gaia GPS and CalTopo for backcountry trails and forest roads, where a street navigator gives up and tells you to make a U‑turn. Apple Maps, Google Maps or Waze on the pavement. Coordinates anywhere in the CAD notes are tappable, so a lat/long from a caller is one tap from a route.
Calls you can read at a glance
Every call is classified — medical, fire, MVA, hazmat, rescue, alarm — sorted using tens of thousands of real dispatches, so the district map reads instantly by color.
Hydrants on the map
Import the hydrant data you already keep and it draws on the incident map — flow, size and out-of-service status, available offline with the rest of the call. Import and display; we’re not pretending to run your flow testing.
The parts that aren’t table stakes
Native apps, push notifications, a map with pins, breaking through silent — every app in this category has those, and none of them is a reason to switch. These are the parts that took work.
Twenty seconds before the tone
Pre-alert fires the moment a call is put in your district, before one of your units is put on the call. Across 29,000 calls through a dispatch center that gap ran a median of twenty seconds — against a median turnout of sixty-seven.
It announces the call
“Structure fire — 1847 Pine Ridge Drive.” Problem and address, out loud, the way the six-figure box bolted to a station wall does it. The difference is this one is already in your pocket.
Nothing to load halfway up a canyon
The page pulls the whole incident down while you still have wi‑fi. Open an app for the first time halfway up a canyon and there’s nothing to open — which is the part that bites, not the alert itself.
A tracking window that closes itself
Location runs from the moment you tap respond until you arrive, or twenty minutes, whichever is first. Then it stops on its own. Between calls it doesn’t track you at all, because members are running this on their own phones.
Connected to the rest of the station
Respond stands alone, but with the full stationOS suite the same calls flow into your NERIS reports and turnout feeds your personnel records. Nobody types the same call in twice.
Written by someone still on the roster
Plenty of competitors can point at a firefighter who used to run calls. Respond was written by a lieutenant who is on the schedule this week — after nearly throwing his phone out of the engine over an app that couldn’t map a call properly.
Get Respond in your members’ hands
Available on its own, or as part of the full stationOS suite. Departments are running it today — and your members can download it from the App Store and Google Play now.