Notifications & Reminders
Reminders depend on a short chain — the app build, your notification permission, the phone's power settings, and your reminder hour — and a break anywhere in it looks the same from the outside. Check them in that order; the answer is usually near the top.
Reminders never arrive
Work down this list. It is ordered by how often each one is the cause.
1. Check the app build. Server-delivered reminders and calendar export are recent, and depend on native components — they arrive with a fresh build of the app, not an over-the-air update. If your Settings → Reminders screen does not offer them, that is why, and nothing else on this page will help until you have a newer build.
2. Check notification permission. OmniBurrow needs the OS-level permission. If it was declined the reminders screen says so; grant it in your phone's system settings for OmniBurrow and reopen the app.
3. Check the master switch. Settings → Reminders → Notify when tasks are due. With this off, neither server nor local reminders fire.
If permission is granted and the switch is on but nothing arrives, Android's battery optimization is usually holding the app back — the phone decides OmniBurrow is not worth waking. Exclude OmniBurrow from battery optimization (often called "unrestricted" or "don't optimize") in your phone's app settings.
Manufacturer skins are the worst offenders here, and each buries it somewhere different.
4. Check the task itself. Reminders are for incomplete tasks that are due. A completed task does not remind you, and a task due next week will not fire today.
Reminders arrive at the wrong time
Reminders are delivered at the hour you set, in the time zone of the device, and both are per-device.
- Wrong hour: set it in Settings → Reminders → Notify at. Change it, then let the phone sync — the new hour applies from the next delivery.
- Wrong by hours: the device's time zone is what is used. If you travel or your phone's time zone is wrong, reminders follow the phone.
- Two phones, two times: that is by design. Each device has its own hour and zone, so a tablet in the house and a phone in your pocket can differ.
Duplicate reminders
Two systems can remind you, and they are meant to hand over cleanly:
- Local reminders are scheduled on the phone itself, so a task created offline still reminds you.
- Server reminders take over once the task has synced, and the local one is suppressed.
If you get two for the same task, the usual cause is the task not having synced — check Sync Diagnostics for a pending count that is not clearing. Once it uploads, the server becomes authoritative and the duplication stops.
Several tasks due on the same day should arrive as one grouped notification ("5 tasks due"), not one per task. A storm of individual notifications means they are being delivered locally rather than by the server, which again points at sync.
Calendar entries are wrong
Calendar export writes all-day events to a writable calendar on your phone, with no alarm of their own — the reminder is the app's job, and an alarm on the event would mean two notifications for one task.
- No events at all: calendar permission was declined, or the phone has no writable calendar. The switch turns itself back off rather than pretending to work.
- Events did not update: they follow the task. Changing the title, notes, or due date updates the event in place; completing the task removes it; reopening brings it back.
- You deleted an event by hand: OmniBurrow notices it is gone and recreates it on the next sync.
- Events remain after turning export off: switching off removes what OmniBurrow created. If you revoked calendar permission first, it can no longer see them to clean up — re-grant, turn export off, then revoke.
See Calendar Export.
Conflict notifications
These are separate, and deliberately so. A sync conflict always notifies you — it is not subject to the reminder switch or the reminder hour, because it needs a decision from you rather than being a scheduled nudge.
If conflict notifications are not arriving either, the cause is the shared part of the chain: notification permission and battery optimization. Sync Diagnostics shows whether the phone has a push token registered and whether the notification channels are set up.
What you should not see is a notification every time something syncs — routine syncing is silent by design.