Is ORBII coming to iPhone?

Yes, starting with a second app called ORBII Circle. It is for the people in someone's trusted circle: you are told the moment they raise an alarm, you can see where they are, and you can say out loud what you are doing about it. Development started in September 2026 and it is not released yet.

Why not just put the whole ORBII app on iPhone?

Because iOS does not permit several of the things ORBII depends on. An app cannot send an SMS by itself, cannot draw an alert over other apps, and cannot restart its own listening service after being killed. Rather than ship a weaker app and call it the same product, we are building the part of ORBII that iOS supports properly and being honest about the rest.

Will Voice SOS work on iPhone?

Not in the first release. It is technically possible, and other safety apps do it, but iOS requires the listening session to start while the app is open and it cannot restart itself afterwards. That is a meaningfully weaker guarantee than on Android, so we are building the circle app first and taking Voice SOS on later, once we can be specific about what it does and does not promise.

When will it be released?

We are not giving a date. The code exists and builds, and it needs real testing on real phones before anyone should depend on it. We will say when it is in TestFlight.

Does ORBII Circle cost anything?

No. Receiving an alert from someone who trusts you will always be free.

We Have Started Building ORBII for iPhone

ORBII Circle is a second app, for the people who receive an alarm rather than the person who raises one.

We have started building ORBII for iPhone.

Not by porting the app that exists. By building the half of it that iPhone can actually do properly, and saying plainly which half that is.

The hole we are closing

ORBII asks you to pick up to four people you trust. They get your alert, your live location, and the ability to respond.

There has never been an app for those people. They get a notification from the main ORBII app, and on iPhone they have had nothing at all.

Which produces a specific and fairly serious failure. A woman on Android cannot properly include her mother if her mother uses an iPhone. That mother is the single most important person in the whole chain. She is the one who picks up at 2am, the one who will call 112 without hesitating, the one who knows where her daughter actually is. And she has been the person our product could not reach.

That is what ORBII Circle is for.

Sign in with an emailed code. No password, because the person using this app installed it once, months ago, at their daughter’s request, and a forgotten password on the night it matters is our failure and not theirs.

Then one screen: is anyone I care about in trouble right now.

Most days that screen is nearly empty and says everyone is okay. We have kept it that way deliberately. Anything we added to make a quiet evening feel richer would be something to scroll past on the one evening it is not.

When an alarm is raised, the card leads with the thing that actually decides whether you get out of your chair. Not “alert sent”, which you already know because you are reading the alert. “Nobody has responded yet.”

Open it, and you get her location in type large enough to read aloud to a 112 operator, with the coordinates underneath the place name, because coordinates are always right and a wrong building name sends people to the wrong gate.

And then the part that matters most.

One person says they are calling, and everyone else sees it

Four people each seeing “somebody should call 112” is four people assuming somebody else did.

That is the best documented failure in emergency response, and software makes it worse rather than better, because it shows all four of them the same screen at the same instant.

So in ORBII, calling is claimed. One person taps “I am calling 112”. Their phone dials, and everyone else watching that alert sees who has it. Letting go is as easy as claiming, because a promise nobody can take back is worse than no promise at all: it stops the others from acting.

We shipped that on Android on the 1st of September. It is in the first build of ORBII Circle too, sharing the exact same code, so the two apps cannot drift apart on the one screen where being out of sync would be dangerous.

It checks, as well as listens

Every safety app relies on a push notification to tell you something has happened.

Push fails in ordinary, boring ways. A phone on silent. A notification swiped away half asleep. An Android battery manager killing the app overnight. Each of those quietly loses an emergency, and nobody finds out until afterwards.

So ORBII Circle refreshes by itself every twenty seconds while it is open, and you can pull down to check any time you feel uneasy. The notification is treated as an accelerant, not as the mechanism.

Doing that needed a new piece of the backend, because until now nothing could answer the question “is anyone in my circle in trouble”. We had removed the ability to ask, on purpose, a long time ago: an earlier version let any signed-in account list the live coordinates of everyone in the country who was currently in an emergency, which is a stalking tool wearing a rescue app’s clothes. The new one takes no location and no search radius at all. It answers only for people who share a live circle with you, and it cannot be pointed at a stranger.

What iPhone will not do, and we are not going to pretend otherwise

This is the part most announcements leave out.

Voice SOS will not be in the first release. iOS will not let an app start listening in the background. A listening session has to be started while the app is open, and if iOS kills it, or you take a call, or you force quit, it stops and does not come back on its own. On Android, ORBII notices it was killed and restarts itself. On iPhone there is no equivalent. It is buildable and other safety apps do ship it, but the guarantee is weaker, and Voice SOS is the feature people trust most. We would rather add it later with an honest description than ship it now with a vague one.

Automatic SMS is not possible on iPhone at all. No app can send a text message by itself on iOS. It can only open the message composer with everything filled in, and a person has to press send. On Android, ORBII’s SMS lifeline goes out on its own when there is signal but no data, which in much of India is the normal case rather than the edge case. On iPhone that becomes a tap.

The Bluetooth mesh will be weak on iPhone. iOS heavily restricts what an app may broadcast in the background. An iPhone will be a poor relay compared to an Android phone, and we are not going to claim otherwise in a feature list.

Alerts over other apps are not possible. There is no way on iOS to draw over whatever you are currently using. Apple has an entitlement called Critical Alerts that can sound through silent mode and Do Not Disturb, which is arguably better for waking someone at 2am, and we will be applying for it. It has to be granted per app and we do not have it yet.

It builds, and it has not been tested on an iPhone yet

The code exists. It signs in, it lists active alarms for your circles, it opens one, and it claims and releases actions. It typechecks clean and the iOS bundle builds.

It has not been tested on a real iPhone, and nobody should depend on it yet. We do not have an iPhone. The next step is borrowing one, then TestFlight.

We are not giving a release date. On a safety app a missed date is not embarrassing, it is a person who expected something to work.

Why we are telling you now

Because we would rather be held to this than announce it after it is finished.

If you have an iPhone and someone you care about uses ORBII, this is the app that was missing, and it is being built. If you want to try it when it reaches TestFlight, write to us through the contact page and we will put you on the list.

ORBII Circle will always be free. Being the person somebody trusts is not a premium feature.