OK, so I was approached today by the boss. He wants me to create an App that people can download for free in our county. We want a missing person app to be able (with all the relevant permissions been given) to immediately publish to the app basic details of a high risk missing person. Essentially, a person is reported missing and is deemed very high risk and we want to enlist the help of buses, railways, pub staff etc to keep an eye out to find them. Now uploading and refreshing content I have mastered on Buzztouch (using this in another App), but what I would like to do and this is the question is to refresh the content and auto send a message to anyone who has the App that there is a new missing person, I need this in the same way that it would show as a message on the phone like a text message or notification message. Does anyone know if this is possible via buzz touch and if so how I might go about moving this forward. My initial thought is it can't be done and I will need to send a group sms to subscribers, but thought I would ask first....As always I thank you in advance. Having posted a message yesterday I was recalled quite chuffed at all of you who want to help. conversely my knowledge of coding is non existent.

Anything is possible on buzztouch.

Yeah it can be done! LA

I blame myself. I should know better in how to phrase the question! Would anyone be able to point me in the right direction of a specific plugin or advice about how i would go about doing this. Advise that it is not for the novice and requires the ability to write code perhaps may suffice, as I am fully reliant on existing plug ins and my forays into writing or adjusting the coding always ends in lots of red exclamation marks!

To "autosend" anything to anyone, you would first have to have their permission. Somewhere in the app there should be a button or an entire screen that says "send me the news", something like that. Then they should also give you their email addresses so that you have the target to send to. In an ideal case, that would be the email address that is already on their phone, or the address that they have access to from the phone. To register the user, you can use the Beautiful Plugin from the Market. It is cheap and excellent. That will get you the registered email address into one of BT server's internal databases. So far so good, however, to automatically send the emails, you would have to have a piece of code to read the addresses and send them out. That "piece of code" would have to be written specifically for you (it is called custom programming, or, in this case, custom plugin programming), which means you would either have to write it yourself or to pay someone to do it for you. Another solution, without paying a couple of hundred of quids for custom programming, would be to do all of it on your own, with a combination of MySQL commands, some ready made PHP code and a mailer program, which should be readily available on a cPanel host. While possible, it is error-prone and time consuming, not to mention that one can all too easily destroy all the data in the database if not careful. Another possibility would be to use push notifications and SMS messages. BT does have push notifications, they don't really work or not that easily, and what people end up with, is to install Parse code into the app; then the push notifications will work properly. As for the SMS messages, that story would be similar to sending emails, you'd first have to obtain a phone number, a permission, store the phone numbers into a database, then use some custom made software to pull the data out and send SMS messages.

Dusko, that is a thoughtful concise and very helpful answer. I really appreciate that. I agree about the registering of e mail or phone number and that had to form part of the App so you are spot on. I thought about the e mail version which is easier to send group e mails to from a computer but know that e mails, on any phone I have had anyway, don't come up with a brief message to the user - they only get a ping or a vibrate so sms I think is the way to go. I think that I might need to separate the App from the messaging so an update to the App can be made, but then send out a bespoke message to those registered to alert them to a new missing person. This is in the infancy, but the Beautiful Plugin pointer is something I will look at next. Thanks again.

If it's for the whole county, you can just make it send a 'local notification' when there is new missing person. It's very easy to do on both platforms. Then anyone that had the app would get the news. Then you can have the messages saved on a local database on the phone so you could load them in a list/table view for viewing