Alarm.com is recommending that users switch from SMS notifications to (Alarm.com app) push notifications due to SMS issues that don’t appear to be going away. If you’re setting up new notifications we recommend push over SMS. If you already have SMS notifications they are planning to make a migration tool available in the Alarm.com app soon.
From Alarm.com:
We have communicated previously about changes to the carrier gateways that we rely on to send SMS and MMS notifications. Recently, T-Mobile made changes that impacted our ability to send messages with media attachments; a few weeks later, we saw full disruption to SMS messages sent via the Sprint gateway. (Sprint was acquired by T-Mobile in 2020, but many customers still have SMS numbers that they have set up to receive messages via the Sprint gateway.)
We expect these types of disruptions to continue for SMS users; while we have no plans to remove SMS/MMS capabilities for now, we will be making an active effort to encourage the use of push notifications wherever possible.
As part of this active effort to reduce SMS usage, we will soon be launching an optional Push Notification Migration Tool within the app, encouraging select customers to migrate their notifications from their SMS contact over to their push device. If they choose to migrate their notifications, their SMS contact will be removed from the notifications (but not from their address book) and replaced with their push notification device. Initially, we will target only the simplest scenario - customers with exactly 1 SMS contact and 1 push device – and only for SMS contacts that are designated as belonging to networks that have been more problematic for SMS recently – Sprint, T-Mobile, and Rogers. We understand some customers will continue to want to use SMS, so this tool will be an optional prompt that can be dismissed when presented to the user upon login.
