Reminders that don’t arrive
Almost always your phone’s battery saver, and almost always fixable in about a minute.
- On Android, set Logbook’s battery usage to Unrestricted. This is the cause the overwhelming majority of the time, and every manufacturer names the setting something different.
- On iPhone, check that a Focus mode or the Scheduled Summary is not holding the notification back.
- A reminder arriving a few minutes late is working correctly — see below for why that is deliberate.
Check these first
Two things rule out most of the false alarms before you go near a system setting.
- The reminder is actually switched on. In Logbook, Settings → Reminders. Each one — shot day, water, protein, weigh-in — is separate, and each says Off until you turn it on.
- Notifications are allowed for Logbook. In your phone’s own Settings, under Apps → Logbook → Notifications on Android, or Settings → Notifications → Logbook on iPhone. If you dismissed the permission prompt when you first installed the app, this is switched off and nothing will ever arrive.
A few minutes late is normal
Logbook schedules reminders inexactly, on purpose. The phone is allowed to batch them with other work and deliver a little either side of the time you set, which is what lets your battery last the day.
The alternative is to demand an exact alarm, which is a special permission on modern Android intended for alarm clocks and calendar events. A weekly injection reminder does not need to-the-second delivery, and asking for that level of access for something that tolerates a few minutes’ drift is not a trade worth making. So if your 9:00 reminder lands at 9:04, nothing is broken.
If it lands hours late, or not at all, that is the battery optimization problem below rather than the drift.
Android: battery optimization
This is the one. Android lets manufacturers add their own battery management on top of the standard behavior, and the aggressive versions will stop a backgrounded app from waking up at all — indefinitely, silently, and with no way for the app to know it happened.
The setting you want is usually called “Unrestricted”. The path is roughly Settings → Apps → Logbook → Battery, then choose Unrestricted rather than Optimized or Restricted. What it is called depends on who made the phone:
- Samsung — Settings → Battery → Background usage limits. Make sure Logbook is not in “Sleeping apps” or “Deep sleeping apps”, and turn off “Put unused apps to sleep” if it keeps coming back.
- Xiaomi, Redmi and POCO — Settings → Apps → Manage apps → Logbook. Set Battery saver to “No restrictions” and turn on Autostart.
- OnePlus and Oppo — Settings → Battery → Battery optimization, set Logbook to “Don’t optimize”. Also check “Sleep standby optimization” is off.
- Huawei — Settings → Battery → App launch. Switch Logbook to Manage manually and enable all three options.
- Motorola, Nokia and Pixel — Settings → Apps → Logbook → Battery → Unrestricted.
If your phone is not listed, the words to look for are battery, autostart, background and sleeping apps.
Two more Android settings occasionally matter. Do Not Disturb will hold notifications silently unless Logbook is allowed through it. And on Android 13 and later, notification permission is a separate prompt that can be denied independently of installing the app — if you have never seen a Logbook notification of any kind, check that first.
iPhone: Focus and Scheduled Summary
iPhone doesn’t have Android’s battery-killing problem, and reminders are generally reliable. When one does not appear, it is usually being delivered somewhere you are not looking.
- Focus modes. Settings → Focus. A Focus that is on — including Sleep, which turns itself on nightly — will silence Logbook unless you add it to the allowed list. This catches people whose weigh-in reminder is set for early morning.
- Scheduled Summary. Settings → Notifications → Scheduled Summary. If Logbook is in the summary, its reminders are held back and delivered in a batch at the times you chose, which can be many hours later. Take it out of the summary.
- Notification style. Settings → Notifications → Logbook. If Lock Screen, Notification Center and Banners are all off, the notification arrives and shows nowhere.
After a restart or a time-zone change
Reminders are re-registered automatically after your phone restarts, so a reboot does not need any action from you.
Time zones are worth knowing about if you travel. Reminders are anchored to the time you set in the zone your phone is in, so a 9:00 reminder is 9:00 where you are. Crossing zones can therefore move a reminder relative to the clock you left behind. Opening Logbook once after you land is enough to settle it.
Why there is no server to fall back on
Most apps that promise reliable reminders send them from a server as push notifications. That works well, and it requires an account, a server holding a record of you, and knowledge of what you are being reminded about and when.
Logbook has none of those. Reminders are scheduled by your phone, locally, from data that never leaves it — which is why the app can truthfully say there is no backend holding your health data, and also why a reminder is at the mercy of your phone’s power management in a way a pushed one is not. That is a deliberate trade, and this page exists because it is the honest cost of it.
It is also why the reminder text is deliberately vague. Logbook’s notifications never name a medication, a dose or a weight, so nothing sensitive lands on a lock screen someone else can see. The reminder tells you to open the app; the app tells you the rest.
If it still doesn’t arrive
Write to support@doselogbook.com and include the phone’s make and model, its Android or iOS version, the app version from the bottom of Settings → About, which reminder it is, and whether it is late or entirely absent.
That detail matters more here than for most bugs. There is no crash reporting and no analytics in Logbook, so a reminder that quietly failed on your phone is invisible to me unless you say so — and battery behavior differs enough between manufacturers that your model may be the only evidence that a particular one needs its own note on this page.