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.
Daily — same time, every day. The free built-in option comes first below, because for plenty of people it is genuinely the whole answer.
Daily is the easiest rhythm to set and the easiest to stop seeing: after a fortnight the alert is part of the furniture and gets cleared without being read.
Why this one slips: It happens in the first minute of the shift, when you are putting bags down and talking to people — the least attentive minute of the whole day.
iOS deliberately exempts alarms from the silent switch and from Do Not Disturb, so a Clock alarm makes noise even on a muted phone. It costs nothing. If it works for you, you do not need us — the catch is that an alarm is one tap to stop, and taps are cheap.
A silent banner still loses here: a silent alert at the exact moment your hands and attention are both full is the definition of a missed one.
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.
It happens in the first minute of the shift, when you are putting bags down and talking to people — the least attentive minute of the whole day.
Deadlines, renewals and paperwork that nobody else is going to chase you about. 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. Daily is the easiest rhythm to set and the easiest to stop seeing: after a fortnight the alert is part of the furniture and gets cleared without being read.
Read next: an app that calls instead of sending notifications · reminders when your phone is on silent · is it a real call or a notification?
iOS deliberately exempts alarms from the silent switch and from Do Not Disturb, so a Clock alarm makes noise even on a muted phone. It costs nothing. If it works for you, you do not need us — the catch is that an alarm is one tap to stop, and taps are cheap.
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 →