Everything on one screen: how often this usually needs to happen, the free way to set it on the iPhone you already own, and what changes if a phone call does it instead.
Yearly — once a year, on a date. The free built-in option comes first below, because for plenty of people it is genuinely the whole answer.
A reminder you set a year ago is a message from a stranger. By the time it fires you have changed phones, changed habits and lost the context that made it urgent.
Why this one slips: The chirp is the reminder most people rely on, and the standard human response to a chirp at three in the morning is to take the battery out and forget.
Two alerts on a dated event is genuinely the right free tool for a deadline, and it costs nothing. Its weakness is the same as every notification: both alerts are silent banners you can clear without doing anything. If the timing is the hard part, an iPhone Clock alarm is stronger — iOS exempts alarms from the silent switch and from Do Not Disturb.
A silent banner still loses here: a yearly notification about a battery is the single most dismissible alert your phone will ever show you.
With ReminderCall your phone rings like a normal incoming call — a real call over the phone network, not a banner and not an in-app alarm. You answer, and a voice reads the reminder out loud in the words you wrote. Answering is an action, which is harder to do absent-mindedly than clearing a notification.
To be precise about it: a call follows your ring settings rather than your notification settings. On hard mute it vibrates and takes over your screen instead of ringing out loud, unless you save the number as a contact with Emergency Bypass switched on yourself.
The chirp is the reminder most people rely on, and the standard human response to a chirp at three in the morning is to take the battery out and forget.
Weekly rhythms and one-off risks around the house, from bin night to the oven you walked away from. The failure is almost never that you did not know — it is that the prompt arrived at a moment when acknowledging it was easier than acting on it. A reminder you set a year ago is a message from a stranger. By the time it fires you have changed phones, changed habits and lost the context that made it urgent.
Read next: a reminder app for people who forget everything · reminders when your phone is on silent · weekly and monthly repeats
Two alerts on a dated event is genuinely the right free tool for a deadline, and it costs nothing. Its weakness is the same as every notification: both alerts are silent banners you can clear without doing anything. If the timing is the hard part, an iPhone Clock alarm is stronger — iOS exempts alarms from the silent switch and from Do Not Disturb.
The other free move, and often the more effective one: anchor it to something you already do without thinking — after the kettle goes on, before you lock the front door, as you sit down at your desk. A reminder attached to an existing habit needs far less from your phone. Try both for a fortnight before you pay anybody for this.
Get ReminderCall — free on the App Store Get →