Make sure your alarms actually fire

Almost everyone sets a second alarm in their phone's own Clock app the night before the first day back. It's a reasonable thing to do with a new app, and this page is how to stop doing it.

The list of things that can actually keep an alarm quiet is short, and none of it is mysterious. Either the alarm isn't armed for that kind of day, or your phone has been given permission to stay quiet. Both take about a minute to check — and the last two steps prove it out loud rather than asking you to take our word for it.

1. 01

   Check it's armed for the right kind of day

   Open the calendar and tap the next day you actually have school. The panel underneath is the honest answer: it names the day type, counts what's coming, and lists every alarm with its own switch.

   Here Wednesday the 29th is a B-Day, and all three alarms in the B-Day Alarms group are listed and on. That is what armed looks like.

   This one check is complete on its own. An alarm only appears in this list when its group is switched on as well as the alarm itself, so anything you can see here reading as on is genuinely queued. There's no second switch hiding somewhere else.

   The most common reason an alarm “didn't go off” isn't a phone setting at all — it was in the wrong group. An alarm in your B-Day group simply doesn't exist on an A day. If a day looks emptier than you expected, check the day type before you check anything else.

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2. 02

   Confirm Critical Alerts on iPhone

   This is the setting that makes an alarm behave like an alarm instead of like a notification. Open your phone's Settings, search for ScheduleLock, and tap Notifications.

   Allow Notifications on, and Critical Alerts on. Apple's own description of what that means sits on the same screen: critical alerts appear on the Lock Screen and play a sound even if a Focus is on or iPhone is muted.

   You already said yes to this during setup, so it should be on. It's worth confirming once anyway, because it's the single setting a silenced phone would otherwise win against.

   Android has no equivalent switch, because it splits the same job across three permissions — those are the last step on this page.

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3. 03

   Check the alarm's own volume

   Every alarm carries its own volume, and it's shown right on the alarm: the Sound row gives you the sound name and a percentage together. Tap it to change either one.

   That percentage is the number that matters. ScheduleLock rings an alarm at the volume set here rather than at whatever your phone's volume happens to be, on both iPhone and Android. An alarm at 100% rings at 100% even if you turned the phone right down during a staff meeting and forgot about it.

   Sound previews are the one exception, and only on iPhone: they play through your phone's media volume, so a preview can be silent on a turned-down phone while the alarm itself would not be. The app tells you so on that screen when it notices.

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4. 04

   Add a test alarm a couple of minutes out

   Nothing settles this like hearing it. Add an alarm two or three minutes from now to a group that covers today, save it, and the top of the home screen confirms the countdown — the time, the label, and how long you've got.

   Do this on a school day if you can. On a weekend or in the middle of a break nothing will ring, and that is the app working rather than failing. If you want to test on a day off anyway, put the test alarm in a Day-of-Week group that includes today: those ignore the rotation and fire on whichever weekdays you pick, which is exactly what the shot below is doing on a Sunday.

   Delete the test alarm when you're done. Nothing else about your setup changes.

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5. 05

   Lock your phone and let it ring

   Then leave it alone until it goes off. What arrives is this: a red CRITICAL tag, the app's name, and your alarm's label, on the lock screen.

   That tag is your phone confirming the alarm came through as a critical alert rather than as an ordinary notification — everything you checked two steps ago, demonstrated.

   Snooze and dismiss live behind a long press on iPhone, which isn't obvious, so the alarm says so in its own text. On Android they're ordinary buttons on the notification.

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6. 06

   On Android, a few more settings

   Android spreads the work Critical Alerts does on iPhone across three separate permissions, and the app asks for all three during setup. Say yes to each and there's nothing left to do; if you skipped one, they're all in your phone's settings under ScheduleLock.

   Notifications, so an alarm can appear at all. Alarms & reminders — the switch labelled “Allow setting alarms and reminders” — so it fires on the exact minute instead of whenever the system next gets round to it. And permission to appear over other apps, so the alarm can take over the screen. Samsung phones call that last one “Appear on top”; most others call it “Display over other apps”.

   That last one is the one worth understanding, because it's the one that goes quiet rather than missing. On Android the sound comes from the full-screen alarm screen, not from the notification, so blocking that screen from opening can leave you with a silent notification where you expected a ringing phone. If ScheduleLock ever shows a red “Overlay permission needed for screen-on alarms” banner on its home screen, that's this — tapping Grant goes straight to the setting.

   Two more that aren't permissions, both on the same App info screen. Set Battery to Unrestricted, so the phone never pauses the app overnight. And turn off “Manage app if unused” — it's on by default, and it lets Android strip an app's permissions after a few months of nobody opening it, which is exactly what a long summer looks like.