iOS vs Android

Monitoring & dashboard

This is the section with no asterisks: every row is on both platforms. You get the same live Socket.IO stream rather than polling, the same 25+ monitor types Uptime Kuma supports, the same nested groups, filters and drag-to-arrange, and the same ability to create, pause and delete monitors from the phone instead of finding a laptop.

Kiosk mode is the row worth knowing about. It fills the screen with a status wall and keeps the display awake, which turns a retired iPad or Android tablet into a wall-mounted status board for the cost of a stand. The tablet layout it builds on — sidebar, list and detail side by side — is a genuine tablet design rather than a stretched phone app, on both platforms.

Heartbeats & history

Also full parity. Heartbeat bars are the coloured strip Uptime Kuma users already recognise: one block per check, so a glance tells you whether a monitor is solidly up or quietly flapping. Both apps draw the last 24 hours, overlay response-time sparklines, and let you scrub the chart to any point in time.

Incident insights is the part that does not exist in the Uptime Kuma web UI at all — mean time to recovery, total downtime, and which monitor is flakiest across a period. It is the difference between knowing a thing broke and knowing whether it keeps breaking. Post-incident notes and shareable incident cards are on both platforms too.

Notifications & alerts

This is where the platforms genuinely diverge, and the divergence is about who controls the override rather than about capability.

On iPhone, an ordinary push notification is silent when the phone is. The only thing that changes that is Apple Critical Alerts, an entitlement Apple grants app by app on request. KumaAlert holds it, and you apply it per monitor — so the database can wake you at 3am and the blog cannot. You cannot configure your way to this; either an app has the entitlement or it does not.

On Android nobody needs an entitlement, because you hold the switch. Notification channels carry their own importance and Do Not Disturb behaviour, so you set the outage channel to Urgent, give it its own sound, and allow it to override DND in system settings. Same outcome, reached from the other direction. KumaAlert ships separate channels for down, recovery, maintenance and app updates precisely so you can make one loud without making all four loud.

Everything else in this section is identical: per-monitor rules covering mode, severity, alert delay and repeat-until-acknowledged, quiet hours, custom sounds, Acknowledge and Snooze actions on the notification itself, and the per-server webhook that gets configured for you when you add a server.

Widgets & live surfaces

Home-screen widgets are on both platforms and work the same way — pick a server or a handful of monitors, and tapping one deep-links to that monitor rather than the app's front page.

The Apple-only rows below them are not omissions. Live Activities and the Dynamic Island are iOS system surfaces with no Android counterpart: an outage becomes a card on your Lock Screen with a downtime timer ticking up in real time and an Acknowledge button, and it stays there while the incident runs. Android has no API that does this, so the same information arrives as a push notification carrying the same actions. Lock Screen widgets are the same story.

Android gets something iOS does not, though: a Quick Settings tile, which puts overall status one swipe from any screen including the lock screen. On balance this section is the clearest argument for carrying the pager on an iPhone — and the reason is Apple's surfaces, not the Android app.

Smartwatch

Both platforms get a watch app and complications: Apple Watch on iOS, Wear OS on Android, included in the same one-off purchase with nothing extra to buy.

A watch is a bad dashboard and an excellent alarm, and the apps are built on that assumption — a complication showing overall estate status on the face you actually wear, and a wrist tap that reaches you in a meeting where you would never hear the phone. Both read status through an Uptime Kuma API key rather than the live connection the phone app holds, because neither watchOS nor Wear OS will keep a socket open in the background.

Server & account

Full parity, including the parts that decide whether the app works at all on a real self-hosted setup. Both apps authenticate the way the web UI does — password, token or API key — handle 2FA/TOTP logins, sit behind Cloudflare Access, send custom request headers for whatever else is in front of your instance, and reach plain-HTTP addresses on a LAN or Tailscale network without argument.

Credentials go into the platform's own secure store: the iOS Keychain, the Android Keystore. Different names, same guarantee — never a plist or a shared preferences file.

The free account is optional and exists for one job: syncing your servers, credentials and preferences between devices, end-to-end encrypted, so only ciphertext is ever stored. Sign in with Apple or Google, or skip it entirely and the app works exactly the same on one device.

Maintenance windows

Parity, and a small thing that saves a real annoyance. Planned downtime should not page anybody, and scheduling it from the phone — single or recurring, pause and resume — means you can silence a monitor from the rack rather than going back to a laptop to do it.

Appearance & automation

Themes, accent colours, onboarding, the in-app support form and the diagnostic support code are on both. So are deep links, so a widget or notification tap opens the monitor you tapped rather than the app's front page.

Siri and Shortcuts is the last Apple-only row: on iPhone you can ask for a spoken status summary, or wire one into a Shortcuts automation. Android's assistant offers no equivalent integration to build against.