Crash detection
What the "are you okay?" screen is, and what happens if you do not answer.
If Circl thinks you have been in a collision while driving, it asks whether you are alright. Answer and nothing else happens. Say nothing and it tells your space where you are.
It is not switched on for general use. If you have never seen the screen, it is not on for your account.
What you see
A full screen asking if you are okay, with a countdown of thirty seconds. It is loud, it repeats, and it buzzes. That is deliberate. It is the one screen in Circl allowed to demand your attention.
If the app is not open at the time, you get a notification instead, so the countdown is never running somewhere you cannot see it.
What happens if you do not answer
Your space is told, with your location. Everyone in it gets the alert, even somebody who has muted you and even inside the space's quiet hours. It is the one thing in Circl that ignores those settings, on the grounds that a crash is not the moment to be polite about notification preferences.
The alert goes to the space you had selected when it happened, not whichever one you look at afterwards.
The countdown runs the safe way round: silence raises the alarm rather than cancelling it. Someone who is hurt, or whose phone has gone into the footwell, cannot tap anything, and that is exactly the situation the feature exists for. Dismissing it takes one tap and is always available.
If it goes off when nothing happened
Tap to dismiss. A hard pothole or a dropped phone can look like a collision to a sensor, and a false alarm you can wave off in a second is the price of the thing working when it matters.
Nothing is sent to your space if you dismiss it in time.
One thing worth knowing: the countdown is also held on our side, so a phone that dies or loses signal mid-countdown does not cancel it. Your space is still told, about a minute later than the app would have done it. That is deliberate, because a phone destroyed in a collision would otherwise be the one thing that silences the alarm.
What it does not do
It does not call emergency services, and it is not a substitute for doing so. It tells the people in your space, and they will still need to act.
Turning it off
It runs only while you are driving, and only if it has been switched on for your account. If you have it and would rather not, email support@circlapp.org and we will take it off.