An annotation holds what needs remembering; the alarm is what makes the device do the remembering for you. Every annotation type accepts alarms — from a plain reminder to a pre-transaction, from a checklist to a birthday — and each annotation can have as many as it needs. An alarm is a system notification: it arrives even with the app closed, and tapping it opens exactly the annotation that produced it.
Where an alarm is born
There is no "create alarm" screen. The alarm belongs to the annotation, so it is created from inside it: every annotation editor has an Alarms field with a button next to it that opens that annotation's alarm list.
- Open the annotation for editing — the one you want to be reminded about.
- Tap the button next to the Alarms field. The sheet that opens lists the alarms already there and offers the add button.
- Pick the repeat type, the time and the date. The fields change with the type you pick, as described below.
- Close the sheet and save the annotation. Alarms only start existing once the annotation is saved — leaving the editor without saving leaves no alarm behind.
There is no message field: what the notification shows is the annotation's description. One more reason for the title to say what needs doing — "Renew the car insurance" works on a lock screen; "Insurance" does not.
The four repeat types
| Type | What you give it | How it behaves |
|---|---|---|
| Once | A date and a time | Rings once and is done. |
| Weekly | The weekdays and a time | Rings on each ticked day. Ticking all seven is the daily alarm — there is no separate "daily" type. |
| Monthly | A day of the month and a time | Rings every month on that day. |
| Yearly | A date and a time | Rings every year on the same day and month. |
Two details that tend to surprise:
- Day 29, 30 or 31 on a monthly alarm. In months that do not have that day it rings on the last day of the month; in months that do, it goes back to the day you asked for. Asking for the 31st does not turn into "the 28th, forever".
- A weekly alarm needs at least one day. Saving with no day ticked is refused, and the screen says why instead of simply not saving.
The annotation's date range governs the alarm
An alarm has no end date of its own. What bounds the repetition is the annotation's own reference dates: if it runs from 01/03 to 30/06, a weekly alarm only rings inside that window and stops after 30/06. An annotation with no reference dates lets the repetition run freely.
That is why clearing the "to" date on a reminder can bring an alarm back to life, and why filling that field in is the most direct way to end a repetition without deleting the alarm.
The Alarms screen
There are two ways in — Menu › Annotations › Alarms and Settings › Alarms, which carries a badge counting the alarms that rang unanswered. The screen is the device's memory of what happened, split into four buckets:
| Bucket | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Missed | Rang and nobody answered. The bucket the screen opens on, because it is the only one still asking something of you. |
| Next | Still going to ring. These are the ones the system is currently holding. |
| Seen | You opened, dismissed or snoozed it. |
| All | Everything still on record. |
The text box narrows whichever bucket you are in — it matches the annotation's description and its type, so typing "reminder" leaves only the reminders of the current bucket. The two filters stack; the search never widens the bucket back out.
Unscheduling and discarding are different things
Each row offers one of the two actions, never both:
- Unschedule (crossed-out bell), only on rows that are still going to ring. This removes the alarm, not just that occurrence — unscheduling one row of a weekly alarm switches off every Tuesday from now on. The confirmation names exactly which alarm is being removed.
- Discard (bin), only on rows that are already history. It throws the record away without touching any alarm. The Discard listed button at the bottom does that to everything the filters left on screen — and never to a scheduled alarm.
An answered record is deleted on its own after 30 days, and the screen says so in its footer. Anyone looking for the history of an old alarm will not find a filter that brings it back — it is simply no longer there.
When an alarm does not ring
Most alarms that "fail" run into one of these four things:
- Notifications turned off for the app. The alarm would be scheduled, ring, and be thrown away by the system. The alarm sheet shows the warning and the button that asks for the permission — the right moment, because it is when you are deciding to rely on an alarm.
- Exact timing not allowed (Android). Without that permission alarms still arrive, but the system may batch and delay them to save battery. The same sheet offers the way to allow it.
- Too long without opening the app. The app schedules the occurrences of the next 60 days, and it does that when you open it. Going more than two months without opening leaves gaps: whatever was beyond the window never got scheduled at all.
- Too many alarms at once. The device only accepts a limited number of scheduled notifications, so the app works to a ceiling of 56 occurrences. The budget is shared round by round — every alarm gets its next occurrence before any alarm gets its second — precisely so a daily alarm cannot swallow the slots of a birthday fifty days out. Whatever did not fit goes in as the nearer occurrences ring.
The app does not run in the background to reschedule alarms on its own. It reschedules when you open the main screen, when you save an alarm, and when you come back to the app. In normal use this is invisible — only someone who disappears for months feels the difference.
Answering an alarm
On a phone the notification carries two actions: Snooze 10 min and Dismiss. Tapping the body of the notification opens the annotation, and the alarm stops counting as missed. Opening the row from the Alarms screen does exactly the same thing — the way out for anyone who watched the notification go by and could not answer in time.
"Complete" is deliberately not one of the actions: completing means something different in every annotation type, while snoozing and dismissing apply to all of them.
On the lock screen
Settings offers Hide alarm content on the lock screen, off by default. Turned on, the notification still arrives but the annotation's text only appears once the device is unlocked. Worth it for anyone whose annotations carry amounts or names that should not sit in plain view.
On iPhone this choice does not exist per notification: the system's own "Show Previews" is what decides.
The alarm is yours, not the annotation's
Two consequences worth knowing:
- Across your own devices, the alarm follows you. It is stored alongside the rest of your data and reaches your other devices on the next sync. What does not travel is the history of what rang: that is the record of what that device did, and it stays there.
- In a shared category, the alarm does not cross over. An alarm created by the owner does not ring on the guest's device, and the guest can put their own alarms on the same annotation without the owner ever knowing. Each side decides when it wants to be called.