For owners
How alerts are grouped
Why one busy junction does not fill an owner's phone, how long an alert waits, and what happens when a message cannot be delivered.
2 min read · Updated October 28, 2026
If three people photograph the same vehicle at the same junction, its owner should get one message, not three. ATAP groups reports so that an alert says something happened and leaves the detail for the app. This guide explains the grouping, the short wait before an alert goes out, and what we do when a message does not arrive.
- Reports that join one incident30 min
a report on the same vehicle within 30 minutes of the latest one joins the same incident
- The alert waits2 min
2 minutes after the first report, then one message for the whole incident
- A move ping pauses10 min
one ping per vehicle in 10 minutes, and a ping is not a report
One incident, one alert
A report on a vehicle joins the open incident for that vehicle if the latest report in it came less than 30 minutes ago. If not, it starts a new incident. Reports and praise are kept apart, so a thank you never sits inside an incident about a signal.
Because the window runs from the latest report and not the first, a long stretch of reports on one stop or one road stays a single incident for as long as new ones keep arriving.
The short wait
Nothing is sent the moment the first report lands. The alert waits about 2 minutes, so that a burst of reports becomes one message that already counts them. Then it goes out once for the whole incident.
It goes only to the verified owner of the vehicle, by email and, if you turned notifications on, to your phone. It carries a link to the app. It never carries the photo, the place or anything about the person who reported. Those stay behind your sign in.
Old reports and failed messages
A message is not sent for an incident that was already more than 24 hours old when its turn came, for example after a long outage. The reports are still in your list in the app. We would rather skip a stale alert than send you a message about something from yesterday.
If a message fails, ATAP tries again after a growing pause, up to five attempts in all. A reminder to check your inbox settings beats waiting: if you see reports in the app that you never heard about, look at your spam folder and at the notification setting on your phone.
Move pings are a different thing
A move ping is not a report, so it is never grouped into an incident and it does not use the wait above. It goes out at once, and the same vehicle can be pinged only once in 10 minutes. The guide on move my car pings has the details.