Alarms and notifications

The core of the problem

Smartphones are getting more and more powerful, but the battery capacity is lagging behind. Vendors are always trying to squeeze some battery saving features into the firmware with each new Android release. Most affected are alarm clocks, health trackers, automation apps, calendars or simply anything which needs to do some job for you at a particular moment when you don’t use your phone.

With Android 6 (Marshmallow), Google has introduced Doze mode to the base Android, in an attempt to unify battery saving across the various Android phones. Unfortunately, vendors such as Samsung, Huawei, OnePlus (and more) did not seem to catch that ball and they all have their own battery savers, usually very poorly written, saving battery only superficially.

These battery-saving features have lots of side effects. They usually kill long-running processes – but don’t care whether the user wants the process to run or not.

They also impose arbitrary limits on random things – like how many times can you schedule an alarm. If you go over the limit – boom! No alarm in the morning! That’s what you get for not reading the documentation on vendor modifications (oh wait, there is no documentation).

How to prevent your alarms and notifications from failing? Opt out of the battery savers for Circadian!

Select your brand of phone below for instructions on how to ensure battery savers are turned off for Circadian.