Search for a safety app in the UK and you will land on three quite different things wearing similar names: StreetSafe, run by the police; the emergency numbers 999 and 101; and personal safety apps like ours. People download one expecting what another does, then find out at the worst possible moment that it does not work that way.
So, plainly: what each one is for.
StreetSafe: for places, not incidents
StreetSafe is a tool on police.uk. You drop a pin on a map where you have felt unsafe and say why — poor lighting, an abandoned building, vandalism, or being followed or verbally abused. You can do it without giving your name.
The single most important thing about it is stated on the tool itself: “StreetSafe is not for reporting crimes.” It is not monitored in real time, nobody is dispatched, and no reply comes back to you. What it does is build a picture forces use to decide where to patrol and which places to raise with councils and landowners.
That makes it genuinely worth using — for the street outside the station with three broken lights, for the alley everyone avoids. It is the wrong tool entirely for something happening now, or something that has already happened to you.
999 and 101: for a police response
If a crime is happening, or someone is in immediate danger, it is 999. Nothing on a phone screen replaces that.
A few things about calling that are worth knowing before you need them:
- If you cannot speak, stay on the line. A 999 call from a mobile that falls silent is put through an automated check, and you may be asked to press 55 to confirm a real emergency. Simply hanging up ends it.
- If you cannot call at all, the emergencySMS service lets you text 999 — but only from a phone registered in advance. Registering takes a minute and is worth doing now, not later.
- 101 is for everything that is not urgent: reporting something after the fact, passing on information, asking about an existing case.
- Reporting a crime online through your force’s website does the same job as 101 for most non-urgent reports, and usually faster.
A personal safety app: for the gap in between
Between “this is an emergency” and “I want to flag a badly lit street” there is a large, common, awkward middle. Walking home on a route you do not know. Being followed but not sure. A first date, a late shift, a run at dusk. Nothing has happened yet, and you are not going to dial 999 because you feel uneasy.
That middle is what a personal safety app is for, and what it actually does is narrower than the marketing usually suggests. A good one lets you:
- Trigger an alert quickly, without unlocking the phone and finding an icon
- Share your live location continuously with people you chose in advance, so they can see where you are rather than where you were
- Record what is happening, so there is evidence afterwards
- Show you what is around you before you set off — which is where crime data belongs, as context for a route, not as a verdict on a neighbourhood
What it cannot do is send a police car. No consumer app has that power. What it does is shorten the time between something going wrong and someone who cares about you knowing where you are.
What to check before you download anything
Most safety apps look identical on a store page. These are the questions that separate them:
- How is it triggered? If it needs you to unlock the phone, open the app and tap a button, it will not be used in the moment it was bought for. Gestures, hardware buttons and lock-screen triggers matter.
- Live location or a single ping? One location sent once is much less useful than a moving dot.
- Who receives the alert? Contacts you chose, or a paid monitoring centre? Both are valid, but they are different products at very different prices.
- What happens with no signal? Ask before you are in a stairwell or a car park.
- What does it cost the battery? An app that drains the phone gets uninstalled within a week.
- Where does your data go? Location history and recordings are sensitive. Find out what is stored, for how long, and who can see it.
- How do you cancel? If that answer is hard to find on the website, treat it as information about the company.
Where our app sits
Safety App UK is the middle category. It covers manual and automatic SOS with live location sharing to your trusted circle, gesture-activated triggers, encrypted automatic incident recording, live video broadcast during an SOS, safer route navigation and a live safety map built on official police data plus verified community reports. Premium is £2.99 a month or £29.99 a year, with a seven-day free trial for accounts that have not used one before, and you can cancel any time in Google Play. The SOS button and the Trusted Circle alert are free for everyone.
It is not a replacement for 999, and we will not pretend otherwise. The three tools stack: 999 when something is happening, StreetSafe for the street that keeps making you uneasy, and an app for the walk in between.
Before you decide anything from crime numbers
Whatever app you end up with, be careful with the statistics any of them show you — ours included. Published crime data is recorded crime: what was reported and logged. Locations are snapped to nearby anonymised points so victims cannot be identified, which means the figures describe areas rather than addresses. And a city-centre area will always look worse than a suburb simply because far more people pass through it.
We wrote up where our own data comes from and what it cannot tell you in this post. If you want to see the numbers for a specific street before you commit to anything, our address checker is free and needs no account.
More on what the app does, in detail: what Safety App UK actually does and how it works.