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.
Weekly — the same day each week. The free built-in option comes first below, because for plenty of people it is genuinely the whole answer.
Weekly is the worst of both worlds — often enough to matter, rare enough that no habit ever forms, so the alert arrives as a surprise every time.
Why this one slips: It only pays off if it happens before the shop, and the version that happens after the shop is just a list of what you already bought.
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 Sunday banner competes with the one afternoon nobody wants to spend doing admin.
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 only pays off if it happens before the shop, and the version that happens after the shop is just a list of what you already bought.
The things a busy day quietly eats: water, meals, and the break you keep meaning to take. 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. Weekly is the worst of both worlds — often enough to matter, rare enough that no habit ever forms, so the alert arrives as a surprise every time.
Read next: a reminder app for people who forget everything · an app that calls instead of sending notifications · how recurring calls work
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 →