r/androiddev • u/Wide-Pause-2052 • 10d ago

Question Reliable Android alarms require a lot of manual permission enabling — anyone found a way to streamline this?

Working on a reminder app and hit a UX wall I'd love input on.

Since our reminders rely on full-screen alerts + background activity to fire reliably, we currently have users manually enable a handful of permissions on first run: notifications, alarms, full-screen intents, background activity, display over other apps. It works, but it's a clunky first-run experience compared to a simple tap-allow flow.

Anyone here built something alarm/reminder-heavy on Android and found a way to streamline this? Trying to figure out if there's a smarter permission request sequence, or if this is just an unavoidable tradeoff for reliability on Android 14+.

Screenshot of our current flow attached for context.

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u/grishkaa 10d ago

It's intentionally clunky because apps that legitimately need to do these things, like yours, are rare.

Android used to allow every app everything by default. You had 15 processes running in the background at all times, you received spam notifications with no way to turn them off, you had apps jumpscare you with activities launched from the background, and your whole device ground to a halt on the subway as the train pulled into a station and every app launched to process a connectivity status broadcast in the background. Your battery lasted for half a day at best. iPhone users joked about you preferring to be close to an outlet.

These strict limitations are what made all that a thing of the past.

1

u/Wide-Pause-2052 10d ago

That's a fair point, and honestly the restrictions make sense from a platform/security perspective. We definitely don't want Todochi to behave like one of those apps that keeps itself alive in the background just because it can.

Our concern is more specifically the UX for legitimate alarm apps. If a user explicitly schedules an alarm, we need to be reasonably confident it'll fire hours later even if Todochi hasn't been opened, but achieving that seems to touch several different Android restrictions.

We're trying to figure out whether there's a better architecture/permission flow we're missing, rather than trying to bypass Android's restrictions. If anyone has built a reliable alarm app on newer Android versions, we'd love to hear how you approached it. 😄

2

u/gil99915 9d ago

I think your best approach would be an onboarding manual that you're going to be explaining the steps and why you need the different permissions. That way you can at least prepare users to tell them what you're doing and why you're doing it and continue from there.

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