I have an embarrassingly basic question: Does the Apple calendar app need to be running on my iPhone to notify me of events?
I got myself into a situation where I missed a meeting today because my calendar didn’t notify me. I realized that the reason why is that I’d disabled all (Apple) calendar notifications because I was using Fantastical. I deleted Fantastical and migrated back to Calendar in my attempts to make my system run smoother a while ago and haven’t received any calendar notifications (surprising to have not missed more meetings!) since.
Realizing this, this morning I turned on all Calendar notifications on my MBP and iPhone settings and created a test event. My MBP notified me but my iPhone didn’t. I launched Calendar on my phone and could see while it initially loaded that it hadn’t added the event yet, so wasn’t even aware of it.
Do I need to be running Calendar all the time on my phone to ensure I’ll be properly notified? Or is there a place where I can edit something so it’s looking for upcoming events (newly added ones, too) in the background, regardless of the app running or not?
I’ve never had an issue with calendar notifications on my iPhone even if it hasn’t been opened all day. Sounds like your issue may have been sync and I have had some slow sync issues. Often see a event pop in when I open calendar. I don’t do a lot of notifications in general and usually schedule well in advance so can’t say how this would affect notifications.
These things usually work based on push notifications. If you force quit an application it can no longer receive push notifications - which would probably explain why your iPhone didn’t notify you.
Oooh, very interesting hypothesis: that force quitting calendar (which I most certainly have done since my last reboot) would mean that the cal can’t push notifications to me. I will reboot and see if the problem persists.
(Un?)Fortunately this isn’t a hypothesis. That’s how it works for developers! Maybe Apple do have a back door into their system to workaround that, but I suspect they don’t or you would have a notification.
LOL, good point! I meant hypothesis in that the force quit is the reason I’m experiencing the lack of notifications and not some other setting I made when I was trying to quiet my phone in the past.
