If you're not getting check-in reminders or partner-ready alerts, the cause is usually phone-level permissions or one of the in-app toggles. Here's how to work through it.

Open Heart sends two kinds of notifications:

Reminders set by your phone — work even without an internet connection. Examples: weekly check-in reminders, gentle daily journaling nudges, anniversary milestones, trial countdown.
Live alerts from us — sent when something happens with your partner. Examples: "Sam marked ready for the reveal," "Your partner accepted your invite."

Different problems have different fixes.

Step 1: check your phone's permission

iPhone: Settings → Notifications → Open Heart → make sure Allow Notifications is on, with banners and lock screen as you'd like them.

Android: Settings → Apps → Open Heart → Notifications → make sure they're enabled.

If your phone has notifications turned off for Open Heart, nothing arrives. Period.

Step 2: check Open Heart's per-feature toggles

In the app: Settings → Notifications. Toggles:

Journaling nudge — daily reminder at the time of day you usually journal
Check-in reminders — morning and evening reminders on check-in day (couples only)
Partner updates — partner ready, partner accepted invite, partner disconnected
Trial reminders — at day 15, 23, 29, and 30 of your trial

All four are on by default the first time you grant permission. If one is off, that whole category won't fire.

Step 3: did the trigger actually happen

Check-in reminders only fire on your scheduled check-in day. Default is Sunday. If today isn't your check-in day, no reminder.
Trial reminders only fire on the specific days. They don't repeat.
Anniversary milestones only fire at exactly day 7, 30, 90, 180, 365 from your first entry. Day 8 isn't a milestone.
Partner ready only fires when your partner taps the ready button. If they haven't, no alert.

Step 4: rate limit

Reminders set by your phone are capped at one per day to prevent the app from getting spammy. If you've already received one today, a second one won't fire — even if it would otherwise.

This cap doesn't apply to live alerts from us about your partner. Those are time-sensitive and bypass the cap.

Step 5: are you on a simulator

Live alerts don't work in iOS Simulator (a tool developers use). If you're testing in a simulator, you won't see live alerts. Reminders set by your phone do still work in simulator.

Step 6: Android battery optimization

Android sometimes kills apps in the background to save battery. If Open Heart isn't running and a live alert arrives, your phone may delay or drop it.

Fix: Settings → Apps → Open Heart → Battery → set to Unrestricted (or "Don't optimize" depending on your Android version).

Step 7: rare — the alert system didn't register

If your phone never finished registering with our alert system, we can't send live alerts to you. This is rare but happens if:

You denied notification permission at first launch and never re-granted it
The app crashed before registration completed
Your network was offline during the registration step

Fix: close the app, re-open it, make sure notification permission is granted, give it 30 seconds. Registration retries every time the app starts.

If nothing here helps

Email hello@myopenheart.co with your account ID (Settings → About → User ID) and we can check whether your phone is registered with our alert system.

Notifications aren't arriving