How the SOS button works

Last updated: 29 August 2026

A breakdown on a highway at night is not a social problem. It is a distance problem — the nearest person who can help is usually somebody you have never met, a few kilometres up the road.

Motogram's SOS is one button. Hold it, and an alert goes out with your location to riders near you. Not to a call centre, not to a subscription service, and not only to your friends list.

It reaches riders who are not your friends, on purpose

Everything else in Motogram is built on the people you have connected with. The feed, the map, your posts — all of it is friends only, and that is deliberate.

The SOS is the one exception. When it goes out, it goes to riders near you whether they are on your list or not, because in an emergency help should not depend on a pending friend request. The rider two kilometres ahead who has a tow strap and a phone signal is more use to you than a friend three states away.

What they get is your name, your photo, roughly where you are, and how far away that is from them. They can open your position in their maps app and ride to you.

What the alert actually does on the other phone

An emergency alert that arrives as a quiet notification is not an emergency alert. On the receiving rider's phone it comes in on the alarm channel with a siren, so it is audible over music, over navigation, and with the phone in a jacket pocket. It stays on screen until it is acknowledged rather than disappearing on the first tap, because the point is that somebody reads it.

A rider who does not want this can turn SOS alerts off in Settings. It is on by default, because an alert nobody receives helps nobody.

Call the emergency number first

What it needs to work

• Location permission. An SOS without a position is a message saying somebody, somewhere, needs help. The app asks for location when you first use a screen that needs it, not on the launch screen.
• Mobile network. The alert travels over the internet. In a tunnel or a dead patch it waits and goes out when signal returns, which is honest but slow — and it is the reason no app should be your only plan on a remote road.
• Battery. Obvious, and the one people forget. A power bank is cheaper than a tow.

What happens to your position afterwards

The alert carries where you were when you sent it. It is not a live feed of your movements, and it does not turn on any kind of tracking. When you cancel the SOS the alert is withdrawn from the phones it reached, and the siren stops on those phones too.

How location works the rest of the time is a separate thing, and it is friends only — see riding with friends on a live map.

Using it well

1. Get off the road first if you can. Then your phone.
2. 112 first, if anybody is hurt.
3. Then the SOS, so riders nearby know where you are.
4. Cancel it once you are sorted. Riders who set off towards you should be told they can stop.

And do not test it on a live group. An SOS that turns out to be a test is how riders learn to ignore the next one.