Why Android birthday reminders don’t arrive

Almost always it is Android, not the app. From Android 13 the “Alarms & reminders” permission is off by default, and Android removes permissions from apps you have not opened in months, which describes every birthday app. Four settings fix it, and checking all four takes about two minutes.

A birthday app is the hardest kind of app for Android to run well. It sits untouched for weeks, then has to be exactly right on one morning. Everything Android does to save your battery is aimed at apps that behave like that.

I build BDays, so I see the support mail. Missed reminders are the single biggest category, and the cause is almost never the app deciding not to fire. It is that Android was never allowed to wake it, or quietly took the permission away while you were not looking. Below are the four causes in the order they actually occur, and they apply to any birthday app, not only mine.

Alarms and reminders, the one that catches most people

This is the big one. To fire at a chosen minute, an app needs a permission Android calls Alarms & reminders. Up to Android 12 apps got it automatically. From Android 13 it is denied by default, and there is no prompt. Nothing asks you. The app has to send you to a settings screen you have probably never opened, and most people never go.

Without it the app cannot schedule an exact alarm. Depending on how it was built it either falls back to an approximate one, which can drift by hours on a sleeping phone, or fails to schedule anything.

Go to Settings → Apps → your birthday app → Alarms & reminders and turn it on. On some phones it hides under Special app access.

Notifications are a separate switch

Since Android 13 notification permission is also its own prompt, and it is easy to dismiss on the day you install something. An app can have perfect alarms and still show you nothing.

Settings → Apps → your app → Notifications. While you are there, check the reminder channel itself is on and not set to silent. Android lets you disable one category of an app’s notifications while leaving the rest alone, so a reminder channel can be off on its own.

Battery optimisation

By default Android puts apps into a restricted mode when you are not using them, deferring their background work into batches. For most apps this is fine. For one that has to wake at 09:00 on a specific date, it is not.

Set your birthday app to Unrestricted under Settings → Apps → your app → Battery. Manufacturers add their own layer on top of this and it is often more aggressive than stock Android: Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, OnePlus and Oppo all ship separate battery managers with their own app lists. If your phone came with one, the app needs to be allowed there too. dontkillmyapp.com is a good reference for the exact steps per manufacturer.

The one nobody expects: Android takes permissions back

Android removes permissions from apps you have not opened in a few months, and it can pause the app entirely. The feature exists for apps you forgot you installed. A birthday app is indistinguishable from one of those, because opening it twice a year is the point.

So it can work perfectly for months and then go quiet, without you changing anything.

Turn it off under Settings → Apps → your app → Unused app settings, or on some versions a Remove permissions if app isn’t used toggle on the app’s permissions screen.

After a restart

Android clears every scheduled alarm when the phone restarts. Apps are expected to reschedule on boot, and a well-built one does. If your reminders stopped right after an update or a restart, open the app once. That is usually enough to put everything back.

Checking all of this in BDays

BDays has this built in, because I got tired of writing the same email. Open Menu → Troubleshoot and it checks each item above against what Android actually reports, then deep-links you to the exact settings screen for the one that is wrong.

Two things it deliberately does not do. It never claims a check passed when it cannot read the real answer from Android, because a false green on the one screen meant to diagnose missing reminders is worse than no answer. And it does not ask for the install-time exact alarm permission that would skip the first step above, because that one is restricted and requesting it freezes all app updates behind a review for weeks.

Reminders in BDays are scheduled on the phone itself, so once the settings above are right they work with no internet and no account. You can set up to two per birthday, at times you choose.

BDays is free on Google Play, every feature included.