From your phone
One tap in the app, or straight from the notification.
How Woof works
Woof asks you first. Then the people you chose.
Woof is not a monitoring service and it is not a tracker. It’s a plan for the day you can’t answer — and on every other day, a question you dismiss in one tap.
Setting it up
Three things, once
Add your pet
Name, breed and the basics. Woof draws your pet from a set of illustrations rather than generating a picture, and you can add vet records whenever you like.
Build your Safety Network
Invite the people you would actually want called — a neighbor, a sibling, a friend with a key. Each one gets a message explaining what they’re agreeing to, and has to accept. Woof will never contact somebody who didn’t.
Choose how Woof protects you
Check-In Protection, where you answer on a schedule. Or Automatic Protection with Woof+, where leaving home, coming back, and a fall your Apple Watch catches can each start the clock instead. One or the other — Woof asks you to pick, so there is only ever one countdown running.
This choice is only about how Woof notices. What happens afterwards — Woof asking you, warning you, then reaching your Safety Network — is the same on every plan.
On a normal day
You tap once, and nothing happens
When your check-in is due, Woof sends a notification. You answer it from the notification itself — you don’t have to open the app, find a screen, or remember a password. The timer resets and that is the whole interaction.
- Woof reminds you before the deadline, not afterThe reminder is a courtesy and is sent quietly, so a routine nudge never overrides Do Not Disturb.
- You can add timeA delay you know about in advance isn’t an emergency. Adding time is bounded and recorded, so it can’t quietly become a way to switch protection off.
- You can pauseGoing somewhere your pet isn’t? Pause it. Woof will not pretend to be protecting you while paused.
If you miss one
Woof works through it in steps, and you hear about every one first
The timings below are Woof’s defaults for a two-hour window and are adjustable — what never changes is the order, and that the warning to you comes before anybody else hears anything.
Straight away
A notification on your phone
Woof asks whether you’re okay. One tap answers it — you don’t have to open the app.
A little later
A text message to you
If the notification goes unanswered, Woof texts the number on your account.
Before anyone else
A final word, to you
Woof tells you plainly that your Safety Network is about to be contacted. This step cannot be removed by any setting, and a late-running cycle cannot skip past it.
Only then
Your Safety Network, one at a time
The people you chose are texted in the order you set — never all at once, and never with your address in the message.
With Woof+
A Woof operator takes a look
If nobody has been able to confirm you’re okay, the case goes to a person at Woof to review.
Two things Woof will never do
Woof does not contact 911, police or ambulance services, and does not request a welfare check. Nothing in the app does it automatically, there is no setting that turns it on, and no subscription unlocks it. Woof reaches the people you chose.
If a person at Woof ever judges that emergency services should be involved, that is a deliberate decision taken by a human being and written down — never something the software does on its own. Woof does not promise it and does not sell it.
Woof never decides you are safe on somebody else’s word. If a Safety Contact says they reached you, the incident waits for you to confirm it yourself. Only you can close it.
Ending an incident
You are the only one who can say you’re okay
From a browser
Lost or broken phone? Woof has a web portal you can sign into with a recovery code, because texting a code to the phone you just lost helps nobody.
By replying to the text
A clear reply from your verified number, to that specific message, inside a time window, can close it. Anything ambiguous does not — “thanks” and “ok I’ll call you later” resolve nothing.
That’s the whole mechanism. If it sounds like the plan you’d want in place, it’s free on the App Store.
Free to download. Free core protection, with no trial and no expiry. iPhone, iOS 15.6 or later.