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All Devices Reminders - Not Being Notified

Buadhai

Buadhai

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 15, 2018
1,138
440
Korat, Thailand
Since updating to iOS 13.4 I'm no longer getting notified of Reminders. Yesterday I missed taking a medication and this morning I missed taking my blood pressure. Same thing on my iMac 10.15.4.

Anyone else or is it just me?
 
Working fine here, iPhone, iPad, and MacOS.

Might want to sign into iCloud via Safari and see if all your Reminders are there, to be safe. Create a test Reminder there. After that, turn off Reminders on all devices and turn back on, see if you start getting alerts again. Basically, a clean slate with Reminder only.

Nuclear option: turn iCloud off on all devices and re-instate.
 
This has been happening to me since long before IOS 13.4 which was actually supposed to fix an issue with reminders. Well it didn't fix anything because at least twice a week I'm still not getting my daily reminder for meds. Luckily I don't usually forget to take them and have the reminder set just in case.
 
Question to OP: are you using stock Reminders, or some 3rd party app?

I've seen with some 3rd party apps where they mess up the alerts. You create or edit the reminder in the app, it will show the due date like you expect, but the alert field is something totally else. Or no alert reminder set.

Can't remember now (been a while) what sequence of events and which tools (might have been a version of Fantastical) caused this, but had to whip up a Shortcut to go through all my Reminders and automatically re-add the alerts (for all Reminders with no Alarms copy Due Date to Alarm).
 
NoBoMac said:
Question to OP: are you using stock Reminders, or some 3rd party app?
Click to expand...
I am using the stock Reminders application. I had Fantastical years ago but haven't used it recently. A reminder that I created yesterday (to have a look at Saturn and Mars this morning) generated an alert, but older reminders still don't.

It's not a sync issue. If I create a reminder in iCloud.com it shows up on all my other devices right away. However, when I look at Reminders on iCloud.com, many of them do not show a date and time. Those reminders do show a date and time on my iOS and MacOS devices.

NoBoMac said:
Can't remember now (been a while) what sequence of events and which tools (might have been a version of Fantastical) caused this, but had to whip up a Shortcut to go through all my Reminders and automatically re-add the alerts (for all Reminders with no Alarms copy Due Date to Alarm).
Click to expand...

I don't understand the difference between Due Date and Alarm....

I'd love to try your shortcut, but when I click on "Get Shortcut" I actually get the following:

Safari Can't Open the Specified Address

Safari can’t open “workflow://shortcuts/f74e1d2c307948ed976d6bba56a52fca” because macOS doesn’t recognize Internet addresses starting with “workflow:”​
 
Shortcuts can only be viewed/used on iOS. That's the message you get from MacOS.

Under the covers, there are two separate fields, due date and reminder date. Usually they are set to the same thing, but once things get messed up, you now have the two fields in affect.
 

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The Repair Reminders shortcut worked OK except that it resurrected thousands of completed reminders dating back to 2012. Fortunately Reminders on the Mac allows you to mark Reminders as completed in bulk.

So, I wonder how things got messed up? Until last week I was getting notifications of all due Reminders. It's only in the last few days that the notifications stopped.

When I look at an existing reminder this is all I see:

Screenshot 2020-04-01 06.29.01.jpg
How do I set separate Due and Remind Me dates?
 
What's showing is what should be showing for having same due date and alert date/time. If there were a different value for alert, there would be (in past versions of Reminders) a second entry with a date/time. Or if no alert time, the time field would not be checked.
 
This is becoming extremely confusing to me. In the Calendar list of my Reminders I have two identical reminders:

Screenshot 2020-04-01 12.17.19.jpg

I created this "event" in the Calendar app many years ago. It repeats monthly. But, when I look in the Calendar app, the last time this event appears is April 11, 2018. It's supposed to repeat monthly, but it never appears after that date:

Screenshot 2020-04-01 12.17.02.jpg

I created a test even in Calendar.

Screenshot 2020-04-01 12.18.17.jpg

It does appear every month in Calendar, but doesn't appear in the Calendar list in Reminders. I don't remember when this went away, but it's gone.

However, I guess it's good to know that if you want an Event time and Alert time that are different you can't do that in Reminders but you can do that in Calendar.

I'm still curious as to why my Reminders got so messed up over this past weekend that they stopped generating alerts. I guess it's yet another forever mystery.
 
Well, after all that it still doesn't work. The blood pressure reminder I was supposed to get at 5:10 this morning didn't happen.

Now what?
 
You're not alone in this. Reminders have been a joke for many years. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. There's no rhyme or reason.

For relatively important stuff I've tried to set two or three reminders a few minutes apart. Sometimes they go off, sometimes they don't. So that wasn't a winning strategy.

If you want reliable reminders the iPhone isn't for you.

Can anyone chime in about alarms? I've never had them fail me. I've used those in the past for important reminders.

Edit: I don't rely on reminders much any more, so I haven't investigated the following recently: In the past I found that if I was recently "using" multiple devices where I was logged in, the reminder would only go to one of them. E.g. it might go only to my Mac while I was in the other room with my iPhone. I had better results if I logged out of all but one device.
 
That's interesting. They've worked fine for me until this past weekend.

Now I've discovered that if I make a new reminder, it works. Reminders made before this last weekend fail.
 
I have moved to Alarms. They have been 100% for me. Plus they force you to turn them off. So if you are taking a long shower, it will ring for about 10 minutes then stop (but still have a display notification). That said, alarms don’t seem to sync across devices for me. I set them on my watch and keep them only on it - which happens to be the way I want it.
 
Alas, like with most things with Apple, reminders, along with mail and calendar notifications, is broken! Reminders don't sync, only alert randomly and are now totally unreliable! As Harris advised, Alarms is the best thing to use for anything urgent.
 
I seem to have fixed this, perhaps temporarily, by re-entering all my reminders and deleting the old ones. I only had about a dozen, so it wasn't a big deal. For now, Reminders are again reliable.
 
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Reminders aren’t working for me on my Apple Watch. They show up on my phone but no notification on my watch so of course I miss them.
 
Buadhai said:
I seem to have fixed this, perhaps temporarily, by re-entering all my reminders and deleting the old ones. I only had about a dozen, so it wasn't a big deal. For now, Reminders are again reliable.
Click to expand...
Thanks mate. I'll give this a try. What Mac OS are you on?
 
I'm noticing that a reminder set to reoccur daily is what seems not to work in my case. Anyone else seeing that?
 
I've had problems with this since the creation of Reminders. Recurring reminders never alerts me after the first one since iOS 13.

I am also having problems with lists I created with iCloud not showing up on my Mac and only on my iPhone 11 Max Pro.
 
If you have daily reminders you should try alarms. They are 100% for me, especially on the watch - even if I remove the watch. I’m sure they work just as reliably on a phone. If you want smart alarms/reminders that work across devices so you don’t have reminders going off on all devices at the same time - good luck.
 
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