When an iPhone is paired with an Apple Watch and receives a critical alert, no sound is played. This makes it very easy to miss such notifications and defeats entirely the purpose of critical alerts.
For context, we build an app that improves the care coordination of heart attacks. We send critical alerts to notify healthcare professionals of such emergencies. These events may occur at night, when the user does not wear the Watch, and will therefore be likely to miss the notification entirely, which can be catastrophic.
I have searched online thoroughly for work-arounds but have not found anything. Others have asked this before elsewhere but have not found definitive answers: link.
Is there anything we can do as developers to force critical alerts to be handled by the phone, or at least to force the phone to ring when receiving a critical alert?
Edit: I am aware that in the Watch app, it is possible to prevent notifications from being mirrored by the Watch. However, this requires the end user to exit my app and navigate their settings. It is also impossible for my app to check if this was done correctly. As such, I am completely in the blind as to whether the user has set up their notifications correctly.
