Every roundup of reminder apps compares the same things: interfaces, recurring rules, natural-language input, price. None of them measures the only thing a reminder is for — whether it fires when it is supposed to.
So we measured that instead. We read 2,252 user reports across eight Android reminder apps and sorted every complaint into three failure modes: the reminder never fired, it fired without a sound, or the operating system killed it. What came out contradicts the way this category is usually sold.
| App | Platform | Price | Best at | Fails at |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Due | iOS | $7.99 one-time | Refusing to be ignored | No Android; nags on Apple Watch |
| Ticka | iOS · Android | Free + subscription | Persistent alerts inside a daily plan | Young app, small review base |
| Apple Reminders | iOS | Free | Being already installed | Fires once, then goes quiet |
| Galarm | iOS · Android | Free + IAP | Group and buddy alarms | Highest miss rate of the alarm apps |
| Alarmed | iOS | Free + IAP | Repeating nags and timers | Dated interface |
| To Do Reminder with Alarm | Android | Free | Ringing through silent mode | Most-reported failures in our ledger |
| Reminders (Chegal) | Android | Free + IAP | Fast one-tap entry | Silent by default when the ringer is off |
| Tasks: To Do List | Android | Free + IAP | Clean, no-subscription task list | Alarms are secondary |
| TickTick | iOS · Android | Free + $35.99/yr | Fewest reliability complaints | Reminders are gentle, not insistent |
| Todoist | iOS · Android | Free + subscription | Capturing tasks fast | Reminders are a paid feature |
| Microsoft To Do | iOS · Android | Free | Costing nothing, syncing everywhere | Ordinary notifications only |
| Any.do | iOS · Android | Free + subscription | Calendar and list in one | Core features moved behind the paywall |
A reminder app has exactly one job, and it is not organising your life. It is interrupting you at a specific moment. Everything else — tags, projects, natural language, themes — decorates that one moment.
This matters more than it sounds, because a failed reminder is invisible. When a to-do app loses a task, you notice. When a reminder does not fire, nothing happens at all: no alert, no error, no evidence. You find out later, when the medication was not taken or the call was not made. That is why reliability almost never appears in reviews — the people it failed were not looking at their phones.
We split 2,252 reports into two groups: apps that advertise an alarm — a sound loud enough to cut through a silenced phone — and ordinary to-do apps that just send a notification.
The three apps at the top are the three that promise an alarm. Two of them are in the app carousel Google shows first when you search for a reminder app. The gap between the top and the bottom of that table is sixteen-fold.
The reason is in the reviews themselves. To ring through a silenced phone, an app has to win an argument with the operating system: exact alarm scheduling, battery-optimisation exemption, permission to draw over other apps, full-screen intent. Four separate surfaces, each of which can break on its own, each of which a phone manufacturer can override. An app that sends a plain notification has none of these, and therefore nothing to break.
This is not an argument for using a weaker app. It is an argument for asking a different question. “Does it have an alarm?” is easy — most of them do. “Does the alarm survive a reboot, a battery saver and a Xiaomi ROM?” is the question that decides whether you get woken up.
The reminder appears; the sound does not. Users find out hours later.
“I usually have my phone on silent. The app reminds me on time but makes no sounds so unless I’m looking at my phone anyway I miss the alert.”
Ringing through a silenced phone is rare enough that people search for it specifically:
“It was hard to find an app where the alarm would ring even when your phone is on silent.”
And rare enough that when an app does it, some users complain about that too — which is the clearest proof the behaviour is real:
“Still can’t use the alarm because it sounds even when I have my phone muted or on do not disturb.”
Android’s battery management suspends background work. The app looks fine; its scheduled alarms are gone.
“Was 5-star until it STOPPED WORKING RELIABLY. At first it was failing when I had battery saver mode on, so I turned that off, but it STILL MISSES SOME (NOT ALL) REMINDERS. When I open it, it doesn’t even have them as missed — it shows them as Upcoming even though it’s HOURS AFTER.”
This gets worse on manufacturer skins. Xiaomi, Huawei, OnePlus and Samsung each add their own process killing on top of stock Android, and an app that is perfectly reliable on a Pixel can be silent on a Redmi:
“It didn’t even notify me on the damned day… Beyond a basic notepad it proved utterly useless on my Xiaomi phone.”
Not the OS — the app. Recurring alarms that stop recurring, reminders that auto-snooze, alerts that fire hours late.
“Often alarm does not go off. About 10-20% of the time.”
“The app has been working for me for the last 2 years until suddenly it failed to ring or notify my phone of an alarm. Instead, the alarm automatically snoozes immediately.”
Who it’s for: one person, one critical thing, zero tolerance for missing it.
What it does well: auto-snooze that re-alerts every minute until you act. The most proven nagging machine on iOS, with a decade of reviews behind it.
Where it breaks: no Android version. The same insistence follows you to Apple Watch, and there is no daily-plan context — it's a list of nags.
Verdict: the most proven choice for pure, single-purpose nagging on iOS.
Who it’s for: people who miss reminders not because they never arrive, but because a single notification is easy to swipe away and forget.
What it does well: Ticka's alerts are persistent — they keep coming back until the task is actually dealt with. Unlike the standalone alarm apps in this list, that behaviour sits inside a daily plan, so a missed reminder is rescheduled rather than lost.
Where it breaks: it is a much younger app than Due or TickTick, with a correspondingly small review base — less public evidence of long-term reliability than the incumbents. On Android it has the same battery-optimisation gauntlet to survive as every alarm app in this list: whitelist it on day one.
Verdict: the option to try if Apple Reminders fires once and you sleep through it — but Due remains the more proven choice for pure, single-purpose nagging on iOS.
Who it’s for: repeat-nag lovers who want timers and reminders in one utilitarian tool.
What it does well: "nag-again" repeating alerts with fine-grained intervals, pop-up reminders, countdown timers.
Where it breaks: the interface hasn't meaningfully changed in years and it shows.
Verdict: ugly, faithful, effective — the pickup truck of iOS reminders.
Who it’s for: families and small teams who remind each other.
What it does well: shared alarms with visibility into whether the other person acknowledged them — a genuinely unique feature.
Where it breaks: the highest miss rate among the alarm apps in our ledger — 2.8% of reports say an alarm simply didn't go off, including long-time users whose alarms started auto-snoozing.
Verdict: pick it for the shared alarms; keep anything life-critical elsewhere.
Who it’s for: Android users who need a loud alarm and won't pay for it.
What it does well: rings through silent mode — the feature its five-star reviews are about, and one few free apps attempt.
Where it breaks: the most-reported failures in our ledger: 4.8% of reports say a reminder never fired. Battery savers and manufacturer skins (Xiaomi especially) are the usual killers — whitelist it from battery optimisation on day one.
Verdict: the loudest free option — and the one you must configure carefully.
Who it’s for: fast capture — a reminder in three taps.
What it does well: the quickest entry flow of the Android apps here.
Where it breaks: silent by default when the ringer is off — the single most repeated complaint in its reviews.
Verdict: great capture, unreliable interrupt — fine for things you'd survive missing.
Who it’s for: a clean task list without a subscription.
What it does well: honest free tier, tidy design, very few reliability complaints (0.7%).
Where it breaks: alarms are secondary — it's a list first, a reminder second.
Verdict: the quiet dependable one, if insistence isn't what you need.
Who it’s for: people who want the fewest surprises.
What it does well: the fewest reliability complaints in our entire ledger — 0.3%. Tasks, habits, calendar and pomodoro in one place.
Where it breaks: its reminders are gentle, not insistent — one notification, easily swiped away.
Verdict: the most reliable — as long as one quiet notification is enough for you.
Who it’s for: capturing everything, fast, across every platform.
What it does well: the best natural-language input in the category; 1.0% failure reports.
Where it breaks: time-based reminders are a paid feature — the free tier won't interrupt you at all.
Verdict: a to-do system first; budget for the subscription if you need the nudge.
Who it’s for: anyone already inside Microsoft's ecosystem — or anyone who wants everything free.
What it does well: costs nothing, syncs everywhere, Outlook integration; 1.0% failure reports.
Where it breaks: ordinary notifications only — no alarm, no persistence, no silent-mode override.
Verdict: the best free baseline; just don't ask it to wake you.
Who it’s for: calendar and task list in a single view.
What it does well: the combined calendar-plus-list day view remains its best idea.
Where it breaks: core features keep migrating behind the paywall, and at 1.7% it collects more failure reports than the other to-do apps here.
Verdict: try the free tier first and see how quickly you hit its walls.
Who it’s for: everyone with an iPhone — it's already there.
What it does well: deep system integration: Siri, location triggers, shared lists, zero setup.
Where it breaks: fires once, then goes quiet. If you miss the one banner, nothing brings it back.
Verdict: keep it as the default; add a nagging app only for the things it drops.
Ticka is our app. Everything above about it is in the same format as the rest — including where it loses.
What we did. We pulled two slices of 150 reviews from each of eight Android reminder apps — the most recent and the most upvoted — removed duplicates, and read the resulting 2,252 reports. Each was tagged for three failure modes: never fired, fired silently, killed by the operating system. The slice was taken on 28 August 2026.
What this measures, and what it does not. The “most upvoted” slice is deliberately biased: communities upvote complaints. So these numbers are not the failure rate of each app in the wild — they are what users considered most worth saying. Alarm-focused apps also attract more alarm-related feedback, because that is what their users came for. Both effects push the same way, and we report them because they change how the table should be read: as a ranking of what breaks, not of how often.
What we could not measure. iOS review feeds returned nothing usable for Apple Reminders, Alarmed or Ticka, and only fifty reports for Due. The ledger is Android. The iOS entries in this list rest on documented behaviour and hands-on use, not on the same evidence base — and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
Almost always battery optimisation. Android suspends background work for apps you have not opened recently; the app looks fine and its alarms are gone. Exempt the app in Settings → Apps → Battery.
Only if the app is built for it. Most send an ordinary notification, which the silent switch mutes.
They should, but this is a common failure point — apps must re-register alarms after boot, and not all do it correctly.
Inexact alarm scheduling. Android batches non-urgent alarms to save power.
For a single critical thing, yes — a one-time $7.99 is cheaper than one missed appointment.
By our ledger, TickTick — but its reminders are the least insistent. Reliability and insistence trade off against each other; that is the real choice.