The Alarm Sender extension for Chrome: what to check when an alarm does
not reach you, and what a browser cannot be asked to do.
This deployment · last updated 31 October 2026
· All support
support@alarmsender.com
— the fastest route for anything this page does not answer.
Not installed yet?
Alarm Sender on the Chrome Web Store.
Brave works too, from that same listing — it is tested.
Other Chromium-based browsers are likely to, but we have not checked
them, so write to us if yours does not.
Nothing happens after installing it
It has to be paired first, and until it is, the toolbar popup shows a
pairing form and nothing else. In the console open Devices,
choose Add device, and type the code it gives you into the
popup. The popup then says Listening.
There is no sign-up in the extension and it never asks for a password. A
pairing code is the only thing it wants.
It says Listening but alarms do not arrive
Open the popup. That alone wakes the extension and makes it reconnect.
Chrome stops an extension's background worker after about thirty seconds
idle, and the status you are reading was written the last time it was
awake.
If alarms still do not arrive, press Stop receiving alarms
and then start it again, which rebuilds the connection from scratch. An
alarm raised while the connection was down is delivered when it returns and
marked late in Activity, so a late alarm tells you the connection
dropped rather than that nothing was sent.
The alert appears but makes no sound
The popup says so when a chime fails, with the reason underneath the status
line — that message is worth quoting to us word for word. Otherwise:
- check the chime is not set to silent in the console
- check this computer's output is not muted
- check Chrome itself is not muted, in the system mixer
No notification appears at all
Notifications are an operating-system permission as well as a browser one.
If the system is muting notifications for Chrome, the alarm still arrives
and still shows in the popup — only the on-screen banner is missing.
Answering and dismissing
A chime that asked to be acknowledged — any critical one — shows an
Acknowledge button and stays on screen until you deal with
it. Clicking the notification body acknowledges it too.
| What you do | What is recorded |
|---|
| Acknowledge, or click the body | You dealt with it. Any escalation stops. |
| Close it with the X | You saw it and swiped it away. Escalation also stops. |
| Acknowledge in the popup | The same as above, for an alarm whose notification has gone. |
Silence in the popup is different from both: it stops the
sound and records nothing, so the alarm still counts as unanswered. Making
a noise stop is not the same as dealing with what caused it.
Answering on any one device clears the alarm on the others, and the console
records which device it was.
What a browser cannot do
These are not faults waiting to be fixed. They are what a browser is:
- it cannot wake a sleeping computer
- it cannot ring through Do Not Disturb
- it does not run when Chrome is closed
The popup warns you when this browser is the only receiver on your account,
and a second browser does not satisfy that warning — two weak receivers are
still not a strong one. For anything you cannot afford to miss, pair a
phone or a desktop client as well.
Why it asks for what it asks for
| Permission | What it is for |
|---|
| storage | This device's pairing, your chimes, recent alarms, and receipts not yet delivered. |
| notifications | The alert itself. |
| offscreen | Playing the chime. A background worker has no page of its own to play sound in. |
| alarms | A one-minute tick that reconnects if Chrome has stopped the worker. |
| alarmsender.com | Pairing, your chimes, and the connection that carries alarms. |
It reads nothing from your browsing — no tabs, no history, no page content,
no cookies — and it has no access to any site other than
alarmsender.com. The privacy policy has
the full account.
A trigger that does not ring
-
Press Ring beside the trigger in the console. If that
rings here, the trigger and the extension are both fine and the problem
is with whatever was supposed to call it.
-
Open the trigger URL in a tab. It is an ordinary GET, and the reply says
what happened.
-
Check Activity. An alarm there that reached no device is
a delivery problem; nothing there means the request never arrived.
Is it us or is it you
Both hosts answer a health check with no sign-in, so you can tell the
difference without waiting on us:
curl https://alarmsender.com/health
curl https://alrm.sh/health
If those answer and your alarms do not, the problem is in delivery or
configuration rather than the service being down — say so when you write
and it saves a round trip.
Writing to us
support@alarmsender.com. Four
things make an answer much quicker, and you will usually have them already:
- which device — phone, desktop app, Chrome, Firefox
- roughly when it happened, and your timezone
- what you expected and what happened instead
- whether the alarm shows in Activity in the console
That last one splits the problem in half. An alarm in Activity reached the
service and the question is about delivery; nothing in Activity means
whatever was meant to raise it never did.
Please do not send us a trigger URL. Anyone holding one can ring your
alarms, and it never expires. The trigger's name is enough.
Alarm Sender is operated by Single Breath LLC.