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.
Twice a day — a morning one and an evening one. The free built-in option comes first below, because for plenty of people it is genuinely the whole answer.
The morning one survives because it is attached to getting up. The evening one has no anchor, which is why nearly everyone who misses this rhythm misses the second half of it.
Why this one slips: A cat will convincingly claim it has not been fed, and equally convincingly not mention that it has — so the schedule cannot live in anyone’s memory.
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: in a household with more than one person, a banner on one phone tells nobody else anything.
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.
A cat will convincingly claim it has not been fed, and equally convincingly not mention that it has — so the schedule cannot live in anyone’s memory.
The people and animals who depend on the routine happening roughly on time. 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. The morning one survives because it is attached to getting up. The evening one has no anchor, which is why nearly everyone who misses this rhythm misses the second half of it.
Read next: setting up a daily reminder call for mum · helping elderly parents remember appointments · can it call my parent instead of me?
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 →