KumaAlert/iPhone & iPad
What a native iOS client gets you that a browser tab never can.
There is no official Uptime Kuma iOS app. On iPhone and iPad you either point Uptime Kuma at a notification service, add the web dashboard to your Home Screen, or install one of the third-party App Store clients.
The reason to pick a native client is the Apple surfaces a website cannot reach: Critical Alerts that sound through Silent mode, Live Activities and the Dynamic Island for an outage in progress, Home and Lock Screen widgets, and an Apple Watch app. KumaAlert does all five for £3.99 once, with no subscription.
Uptime Kuma ships no iOS app, so there are three routes and they are covered in full on the Uptime Kuma app guide: a notification service such as ntfy, the web dashboard added to your Home Screen, or a native client from the App Store. On iPhone specifically, the choice between them comes down to one question — do you need the alert to reach you when your phone is on silent?
If the answer is no, ntfy is free and takes ten minutes. If the answer is yes, a native client is the only route, because sounding through Silent mode requires an App Store app holding Apple's Critical Alerts entitlement. There are currently four native clients on the App Store; they are compared side by side, with prices and last-updated dates, on the alternatives page.
What makes a native iPhone client worth paying for is not the monitor list — the web UI already has that. It is the system surfaces a website cannot touch. There are five, and KumaAlert uses all of them.
| Surface | What it does for monitoring |
|---|---|
| Critical Alerts | DOWN alerts for monitors you mark critical sound through Silent mode, Do Not Disturb and every Focus, at their own volume. Opt-in per monitor, so the database can wake you and the blog cannot. |
| Live Activities | An outage becomes a live card on the Lock Screen with a downtime timer ticking up in real time and an Acknowledge button. You see how long it has been down without unlocking anything. |
| Dynamic Island | The same outage, persistent at the top of the screen on iPhone 14 Pro and later, while you carry on using the phone. |
| Widgets | Home Screen, Lock Screen and Control Center. Status at a glance without launching anything — covered on the widget guide. |
| Apple Watch | A watch app and complications, so a wrist tap is the first thing that happens. See the Apple Watch guide. |
Notification actions are the quiet one people underrate. An outage notification carries Acknowledge and Snooze straight on the notification, so you can take an incident at 3am with a long-press and go back to sleep having recorded that somebody has it. The incident timeline keeps the acknowledgement, the duration and any note you add afterwards.
The iPad build is a genuine tablet layout rather than a stretched phone app: a sidebar of servers, a monitor list and a detail pane side by side, so you are not navigating back and forth to compare two monitors. Response-time charts have room to be read properly, which on a phone they never quite do.
There is also a kiosk mode, which is the reason a lot of people put an old iPad on a shelf. It fills the screen with a status wall, keeps the display awake, and shows the whole estate at a glance — a home-lab NOC for the price of an iPad you already stopped using.
KumaAlert authenticates the same way the web UI does — username and password, a token, or an Uptime Kuma API key — and supports 2FA/TOTP logins, Cloudflare Access, and custom request headers for anything sitting in front of your instance. Credentials go into the iOS Keychain, never a plain preferences file.
You can add several instances at once: home lab, staging, production, each with its own alert rules, and plain-HTTP addresses on a LAN or Tailscale network work without argument. Alerts arrive by an outbound webhook from your server to the push relay, so the instance itself does not need to be reachable from the internet — the phone is never dialling home.
Signing in with Apple or Google is optional and creates a free account whose only job is to sync your servers, credentials and preferences to your other devices, end-to-end encrypted. Skip it and the app works exactly the same on one device.
Step-by-step, with screenshots, on the setup guide.
KumaAlert is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Uptime Kuma project.