KumaAlert/Android

Uptime Kuma on Android

The free route, the native route, and the battery setting that quietly breaks both.

There is no official Uptime Kuma Android app. You can point Uptime Kuma at a free notification service such as ntfy or Gotify, add the web dashboard to your Home screen, or install a native client for the full dashboard with history, widgets and Wear OS.

Whichever you pick, the single biggest cause of missed Uptime Kuma alerts on Android is battery optimisation, not the app. Set the app to Unrestricted and turn off your manufacturer's own power manager for it, or alerts will arrive in a batch an hour late.

On this page
  1. Your options on Android
  2. Making an alert loud enough to matter
  3. Battery optimisation, the real culprit
  4. Widgets, tiles and Wear OS
  5. Connecting to your server
  6. Requirements and limits
  7. Common questions

Your options on Android

Uptime Kuma has no official Android app. As on every other platform there are three routes — a notification service, the web dashboard as a Home-screen shortcut, or a native client — and they are laid out side by side on the Uptime Kuma app guide.

Android is the platform where the free route goes furthest. ntfy and Gotify both have solid Android apps, both are self-hostable, and Android's notification channels give you per-channel importance and Do Not Disturb overrides that iOS simply does not offer without a special entitlement. If all you need is a loud alert, you can build that on Android for nothing.

What the free route still cannot give you is the dashboard: heartbeat history, response-time charts, certificate expiry, incident timelines, maintenance windows, and the ability to pause a flapping monitor from your pocket. That is what a native client is for.

Making an alert loud enough to matter

Android's notification model is genuinely good here, and most people never touch it. Every channel carries its own importance, sound and DND behaviour, and you control all of it from system settings rather than from inside the app.

  1. Long-press any notification from the app and choose Settings, or go to Settings → Apps → [app] → Notifications.
  2. Find the channel that carries outage alerts and set its importance to Urgent — makes a sound and appears on screen.
  3. Give that channel its own sound. Being able to identify an outage without looking at the screen is worth more than it sounds.
  4. In Settings → Notifications → Do Not Disturb → Apps, allow the app to override DND.

KumaAlert ships separate channels for down alerts, recovery, maintenance and app updates precisely so this works: you can make outages urgent and DND-piercing while leaving recovery and maintenance quiet. Per-monitor rules in the app add the other half — severity, alert delay, repeat-until-acknowledged, and quiet hours — so only the monitors that deserve it get the loud channel.

Android 13 and later: notification permission is opt-in at install. If you dismissed the prompt, no amount of channel configuration will help — re-enable it under Settings → Apps → [app] → Notifications first.

Battery optimisation, the real culprit

The most common complaint about any Uptime Kuma Android app is that alerts arrive late, or in a batch an hour after the fact. This is almost never the app. It is Doze plus whatever the manufacturer has layered on top.

KumaAlert delivers alerts through Firebase Cloud Messaging with high priority, which is designed to punch through Doze — but nothing punches through a manufacturer power manager that has decided your app should not run. The five settings above are the fix, and they apply to every monitoring app you will ever install, not just this one.

Widgets, tiles and Wear OS

Android's glanceable surfaces are the ones people actually use day to day:

There is also a kiosk mode for a tablet on a shelf, and light/dark themes with selectable accent colours. The full iOS-versus-Android breakdown, including the handful of Apple-only surfaces Android has no equivalent for, is on the comparison page.

Get KumaAlert on Google PlayRead the setup guide

Connecting to your server

KumaAlert signs in the way the web UI does — username and password, a token, or an Uptime Kuma API key — with 2FA/TOTP, Cloudflare Access and custom request headers all supported. Credentials are held in the Android Keystore. Plain-HTTP LAN and Tailscale addresses work without complaint, and you can add as many instances as you run, each with its own alert rules.

Alerts reach the phone through an outbound webhook from your Uptime Kuma server to a push relay, then via FCM — so your instance never has to be reachable from the internet, and the relay never connects back to it. Signing in with Google is optional and only exists to sync your servers and settings, end-to-end encrypted, to your other devices. The setup guide walks through all of it.

Requirements and limits

KumaAlert is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Uptime Kuma project.

Common questions

Is there an official Uptime Kuma Android app?
No. Uptime Kuma is a self-hosted server with a web dashboard. Every Android client is third-party; the project keeps a community list on its wiki.
Why are my Uptime Kuma alerts late on Android?
Battery optimisation. Set the app to Unrestricted, and on Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, OnePlus and similar devices turn off the manufacturer's own power manager for it as well. High-priority FCM messages survive Doze but not a vendor process killer.
Can Android alerts break through Do Not Disturb?
Yes, and unlike iOS you control it yourself. Set the outage notification channel to Urgent importance and allow that channel to override DND under Settings, Notifications, Do Not Disturb, Apps.
Does the Android app do everything the iPhone app does?
Nearly. Monitoring, heartbeats, incidents, notifications, account sync, widgets and kiosk mode are on both. The genuine gaps are the Apple-only surfaces Android has no equivalent for: Live Activities, the Dynamic Island, Lock Screen widgets, Apple Watch and Siri. The full table is on the comparison page.
Is there a free Uptime Kuma Android app?
For alerts alone, yes - ntfy and Gotify are free, open source and self-hostable, and Uptime Kuma supports both natively. For a full dashboard with history and widgets, the Android clients are either paid or free-with-a-subscription.
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