WatchdogSupport

Work through these in order — the first two account for most cases.

• In iOS Settings › Notifications › Watchdog, make sure notifications are allowed.
• Open Watchdog and check your alert radius in Settings. Fires outside that radius never alert, no matter how large they are.
• In iOS Settings › Privacy & Security › Location Services › Watchdog, choose Always. On While Using the App, Watchdog can only check for fires while it's open on screen.
• Turn off Low Power Mode. It suspends the background work that alerts depend on.
• Check whether a Focus mode is filtering Watchdog out.

iOS also decides when background apps are allowed to run, and it favours apps you open regularly. Opening Watchdog once a day keeps it in that rotation.

Lower the alert radius in Settings — that's the single biggest lever. If you only want confirmed, named incidents, turn off satellite detections; those are raw thermal hits from orbit and there are far more of them.

Satellite detections flag heat, not fire specifically. Agricultural burns, flares and hot industrial sites all register. They're included because they surface new fires hours before any agency report, but they're unconfirmed by design. Turn them off in Settings if you'd rather only see named incidents.

Watchdog reports what the agencies publish. A new fire generally appears once it's been entered into the national incident feed, which can take a few hours from ignition.

• Pull down on the list to refresh immediately.
• Turn on satellite detections in Settings. New fires often show as a thermal detection well before they're named.
• Check the sort control at the top of the list. Sorting by distance puts a large distant fire far below small nearby ones.

• Perimeters draw only when you're zoomed in far enough. Zoom in and they appear.
• Not every fire has one. Perimeters are flown or mapped by hand, so small and very new fires usually have none.
• Watchdog shows perimeters mapped within the last 14 days, so a dormant fire may have a marker but no outline.

Agencies update fire size on their own schedule — often once a day, sometimes less during a busy week. The number you see is the last one published, not a live measurement.

Where no size has been published at all, Watchdog estimates from the mapped perimeter and will show nothing rather than guess if there's no perimeter either.

Watchdog marks a fire out when an agency reports it out, or when it stops appearing in the feeds and stops growing over a sustained period.

If a fire was closed too early, open it and tap Reactivate to move it back to the active list.

Background location checking is the main cost, and it's what makes alerts work when the app is closed. Two ways to reduce it:

• Narrow your alert radius. A smaller radius means less to check on each update.
• Set Location to While Using the App. This cuts background use substantially, but you'll stop receiving alerts while the app is closed.

Go to iOS Settings › Privacy & Security › Location Services › Watchdog. Choose Always for background alerts, and turn on Precise Location — without it, distances and your alert radius are calculated from an approximate position that can be several miles off.

Watchdog refreshes roughly every 15 minutes while it's allowed to run, and immediately when you pull down to refresh. When there's no network, it shows the last data it stored so the map still works offline.

Note that a fresh refresh doesn't mean fresh agency data. Watchdog can only be as current as the feeds it reads.