Pressing SOS in Traxl sends your exact position to everyone in your Circle, pushes a full-screen alert to each of their phones, and keeps your location updating every few seconds until you cancel. It takes about a second on a normal connection. Whether it reaches people depends on three settings on their phones, so set those up first.

What happens when you press it

  1. Your phone sends an SOS with its current location over the live connection. If the live connection has dropped, the app retries for a few seconds before telling you it didn’t go out, so you’re never left thinking help is coming when it isn’t.
  2. The server pushes a high-priority notification to every member of every Circle you’re in. It bypasses Do Not Disturb where the phone allows it.
  3. Your location switches to a fast cadence (a fix every few seconds) so your dot moves in real time on their maps.
  4. Each member can tap the alert to open the map on you, call you, or call your emergency contact if you set one.
  5. You cancel from the same screen; the Circle is told the SOS is over.

Setting 1: notifications, on every phone

An SOS is a notification. If a member tapped Don’t allow when Android asked, nothing arrives. Traxl’s Finish setting up card on Home shows an Allow alerts row until this is done; if Android has stopped asking, the row opens Settings instead.

Setting 2: battery optimisation, on every phone

Phones that aggressively sleep background apps also delay their notifications by minutes. The same exemption that keeps sharing alive keeps the SOS prompt; see the brand-by-brand guide.

Setting 3: an emergency contact

In Settings → Profile you can add one emergency contact (a name and number). It is never required and never shared except during your SOS, when your Circle sees “call their emergency contact too”. For a teenager that is usually a parent; for a parent, often a sibling or neighbour who isn’t in the app.

What SOS is not

Traxl does not call the police or an ambulance; it reaches your people. For emergency services, dial 112 in India, or your local number elsewhere, directly. If you are driving, Traxl’s crash detection can raise an alert to your Circle on its own when it detects a hard stop and you don’t respond, but treat that as a backup, not a plan.

Test it once

Tell the family you’re testing, press SOS, confirm every phone lit up, cancel. Thirty seconds now is what makes the real one work.