Table of Contents
Changelog
- 2025-12-07
- Initial publication
Context
Historically I’ve been Not Fond of traditional telco services (sms/mms, phone calls, voicemail) as they are strongly tied to a specific device and it’s next to impossible to work with them from multiple devices. Signal, XMPP, Telegram, Matrix, Delta.Chat and others don’t suffer this problem. I can link up multiple devices and work with the data freely.
There is a HUGE difference in these approaches. Enough of one that I’ve essentially told everyone that I will not engage via telco services (ie. my ‘phone plan’) unless it’s an emergency and, even then, my ‘seeing’ a notification will be delayed up to 36 hours.
I’m clear, honest and very up-front about this.
This is a ‘big leap’ until you consider
- I really don’t give a fuck about non-scheduled synchronous communication. I actually hate synchronous communication like phone calls, especially when I get a call that’s unscheduled. I much prefer asynchronous communications.
- I have an arm tremor which makes typing on a touchscreen (read: phone) a huge pain in the ass. I greatly prefer using some kind of keyboard for text communication.
- I’m Autistic and some of my Autism quirks overlap with ADHD which means I’ve got speech processing issues and focus issues.
- Due to focus issues I actively avoid looking at my phone and leave it in ‘do not disturb’ mode almost exclusively.
Basically phone calls wreak havoc on my brain, touch screens are not at all accessible for me and notifications fuck with my focus. This means telco services are just not something I get along with. At. All.
Non telco services solve these hassles for me in an outsized way and I lean into this heavily. I can easily use a keyboard to type text, I can lean into asynchronous communication easier and, if I must, can use any device for voice/video calling. Oh yeah: Signal and a few others are fully secure against shitty governments listening in on my communications.
This is nothing to diminish. It’s a massive difference for me and others with similar concerns.
But…
You’ll note an ’emergency’ likely wants faster than 36 hour response times. Especially if someone is trying to get in touch with me for some kind of help or to ensure I’m aware of a critical event. I can appreciate the time problem in this context. Particularly emergencies that may be related to my partner of 15 years.
To illustrate why I appreciate ’emergency’ situtions…
My partner and I have both landed in the hospital with health problems that necessitated emergency medical procedures. Thus far they weren’t ’life or death’ but I have had injuries that should have killed me but instead I walked away with chronic pain. I’ve also called 911 in the USA when I found someone unresponsive, bleeding from their head and sprawled out face down in the foyer of their home. None of these situations were ‘good’. Some put me down the PTSD path.
Due to these events I appreciate emergency situations enough that, for years now, I’ve tried a number of methods to facilitate forwarding missed call, voicemail and sms/mms notifications to my other devices. Everything I tried prior to writing this blog post was an epic fail. The solutions were limited in absurd ways, required me to give all my private data over to surveilance capitalism and worse.
Unfortunately shit happens and sometimes that shit needs fast response so I continued my search for solutions.
As of this writing, I’ve finally solved that problem. Now I’ll be made aware of emergencies quickly and can react accordingly. Yes, I setup forwarding despite my complete dislike and avoidance of all things ’telco service’. I did it specifically because I want to be made aware of emergencies in a timely fashion.
Despite my needs being ‘only emergencies’, the solution I found is far more general and useful if you prefer not having your phone within arms reach at all times.
Forwarding Notifications
The setup I use for forwarding missed call, voicemail and sms/mms notifications is pretty straight forward: Tasker on my phone watches for these types of notifications and when they occur, posts the information to a Unified Push server that alerts my other devices of these events.
To the pedantic folk: I’m well aware the rest of this section is massively simplified and excludes an incredible amount of nuance, detail, etc. Please leave well enough alone. Folk don’t need to give a fuck about the subtle bullshit that doesn’t matter in practice.
The key here is ‘Unified Push server’, in my case Ntfy. Unified Push servers are essentially the open source implementation of low power message notifications. I’ll spare you the nitty gritty details but Google has a special notification forwarding setup in place on Android (by way of the Play Store APIs) that allows apps to go into a lower power mode but still provide you notifications in a timely manner. Unified Push re-creates this and more.
What’s particularly nice about Unified Push is it allows me to push any kind of notification I want to my devices in a standard, shared manner. I setup my devices to talk to the Unified Push Server and whenver a notification is posted to the server I see it on my devices. You can even create different ’topics’ and setup different devices to listen to different topics for notifications. Very powerful and very flexible when it comes to notifications.
Tasker is a meta programming environment that’s been around since the very early days of Android. It’s incredibly powerful and allows you to meta program your phone. To describe Tasker fully you’d need a book sized amount of text. The key bit in this scenario is Tasker can watch for notifications and it can talk to Unified Push servers if you spend the time to do some meta programming.
The setup is very straight forward: Tasker watches for notifications and forwards them to a Unified Push server which other devices watch for notifications.
🎉
Continue reading for how to recreate the setup.
Setup
To setup forwarding you’ll need Tasker and the project XML file from here. You’ll also need an account on an Ntfy server (self hosted or otherwise) and the Ntfy client setup for this server on your device(s) that will receive the notifications. If you self host an Ntfy server, note that Tasker will need write privileges to the topic and the devices receiving notifications will need read access to the topic.
Simply import the linked Tasker xml file and fill in the following variables in each tasks HTTP Resquest step accordingly.
[server]should be replaced with the server’s domain.[topic]should be replaced with the topic that will be used for notifications.[auth]should be replaced with the basic auth info for posting to the topic. See the Ntfy documentation for added detail.
Thats it. Once you perform the above, you’ve recreated my setup and things should Just Work.