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: A card has to be bought, written and posted days ahead, so a reminder on the birthday itself is a reminder that you are already late.
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: the alert names the date and not the lead time, which is the only part that was ever hard.
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 card has to be bought, written and posted days ahead, so a reminder on the birthday itself is a reminder that you are already late.
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. 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: setting up a daily reminder call for mum · helping elderly parents remember appointments · can it call my parent instead of me?
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 →