Alarm? What alarm?

 I was not looking forward at all to receiving the 3pm alarm that was supposed to be going out from somewhere within The Government to every smartphone in the land, so I was relieved when the hour came and nothing happened, no message, no sound, not on my phone nor on Mrs N's.
Call me an anarcho-libertarian but my heart does not warm to the thought that any government has the power to send anything to every smartphone in the nation – and now it seems they can't, even after months of preparation, planning and prepublicity. This incompetence has its reassuring side, but it was also one of the things that worried me about the original plan. Imagine, for a start, the potential for false alarms, mistimings and (in a geographically limited alarm) alerting the wrong people in the wrong place. Much more worrying are the possibilities of hacking a not fully secure system: imagine what havoc the likes of Just Stop Oil or Extinction Rebellion might wreak if they could muster the brain power (which happily seems most unlikely), imagine what bad actors from, say, China or Russia might do...  Still, early reports suggest that a considerable swathe of the smartphone-owning population failed, like me and Mrs N, to hear a peep from The Government. I hope they now abandon this silly and potentially dangerous experiment.