The marketplace sent it at 2:41. Your phone buzzed at 3:04. Nothing was broken — that gap is your phone saving its battery, and both Apple and Google document exactly how.
Lead Race Alert is not a running service, and nobody can sign up for it. Most of this page is about your phone's own settings, and the best outcome for you might be that you change one of them and never need us. That is a fine outcome. It is also cheaper than anything we could ever charge you.
Contractors describe this as "I got the email late", but two unrelated things are going on and only one of them is fixable from the settings app.
This page is mostly about the first one, because it is the one people assume cannot be happening. The second is covered on the home page.
Under Settings, Mail, Accounts, there is a screen called Fetch New Data, and most people have never opened it. Apple's own support documentation describes the default like this:
"With iOS 11 and later, and iPadOS, Automatically is set by default. Your device will fetch new data in the background only when your device is charging and connected to Wi-Fi."
— Apple Support, If you can't receive email on your iPhone or iPad
Read that condition again with a work van in mind. Charging and on Wi-Fi. Not charging, or charging off a cigarette lighter with no Wi-Fi in sight, and the background fetch that would have found your lead does not run. The mail is sitting on the server. Your phone finds it when you next open the Mail app, or when you get back to the shop and the conditions are met again.
Apple's page also notes the setting depends on your mail provider: "By default, Fetch New Data settings are based on what's provided by your email service. If Push isn't available as a setting, your account will default to Fetch." So whether you get instant delivery at all is partly decided by who runs your email, not by you.
Android's power management is documented for the developers who have to work around it, which makes it unusually blunt about what it does to a phone sitting on a passenger seat. From Google's own developer documentation:
"In Doze mode, the system attempts to conserve battery by restricting apps' access to network and CPU-intensive services. It also prevents apps from accessing the network and defers their jobs, syncs, and standard alarms."
— Android developer documentation, Optimize for Doze and App Standby
It does come up for air. "Periodically, the system exits Doze for a brief time to let apps complete their deferred activities. During this maintenance window, the system runs all pending syncs, jobs, and alarms, and lets apps access the network." The catch is in the next line: "Over time, the system schedules maintenance windows less frequently."
Which is to say the longer your phone has been lying still and untouched — which is what a phone does while you are on a roof — the further apart the moments when your mail app is allowed to check. There is a second mechanism, App Standby, with an even starker rule for apps you rarely open: "If the device is idle for long periods of time, the system allows idle apps network access about once a day."
One fair caveat. A high-priority push message can wake an app out of Doze, and the big mail apps use that, so this does not mean Android mail is always slow. It means the mail path has a throttle on it that a phone call and a text message do not.
Genuinely: do these first. If one of them solves it you have lost ten minutes and saved whatever this product would eventually cost.
If you do all five and you are still finding out about leads twenty minutes late, then the delay is not in your settings, and that is the case this product is being built for.
An SMS does not go through your mail app, your mail provider's fetch schedule, Doze, or App Standby. It is delivered to the phone's radio by the carrier, and it arrives with the phone locked, idle, off Wi-Fi and not charging. A voice call is louder still: a ringing phone is an interruption you answer while holding a wrench, which no banner has ever managed.
That is the entire mechanical argument behind Lead Race Alert. Not more information, and not better leads — a delivery path with fewer things in it that are allowed to wait.
Two honest limits. Do Not Disturb and Focus can silence calls too, unless you allow the number through, so this is not magic. And our own pipeline would add its own delay — we read the marketplace's notification, so we can never be faster than the email leaving their server, and we have not yet measured end-to-end latency in production because there is no production.
That question has a different answer from the one on this page, and it is answered on the home page instead of restated here. The short version: the benchmark is the other contractors who bought the same lead, and no honest minute count exists — every precise figure we tried to trace came from a company selling lead-response software.
What this page can tell you is where the minutes go. If your phone is holding mail for twenty minutes because it is neither charging nor on Wi-Fi, that is twenty minutes you are losing to a setting rather than to the competition, and it is the cheapest twenty minutes you will ever get back.
Which platform, what phone, and how long the gap usually is. Especially if you have already tried the free fixes above and it did not help — that is the version of this problem worth building for.
Email signup@leadracealert.com
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