When a reminder might not fire, why, and what you can do about it.
A quick open of ElephantBell re-activates monitoring instantly if your phone has paused it.
Force-stopping from phone Settings — or swiping it away from Recents — stops monitoring until reopened.
If your phone has a "background apps" or battery-tier setting, set ElephantBell to always allow it.
App-based monitoring only runs while your screen is on. The moment you lock your phone, it pauses to save battery, and it picks back up instantly the second you unlock — this is expected behavior, not a bug. Time spent with the screen off never counts toward a reminder's delay.
Certain manufacturers — Motorola, Xiaomi, OnePlus, and others — run their own aggressive battery managers on top of Android's own settings, and these can pause ElephantBell's background monitoring even when everything looks fine in your Android settings. If that happens:
ElephantBell automatically checks and restarts its monitoring roughly once an hour, on its own.
Just opening ElephantBell reactivates monitoring right away — the fastest way to recover it.
Some phones have a background-app or battery permission for ElephantBell — allow it to always run in the background if reminders feel unreliable.
Swiping ElephantBell away from your recent-apps list, or force-stopping it from phone Settings, fully stops App-based monitoring until you open the app again. This is standard Android behavior for every app, not specific to ElephantBell.
Time-based and Location-based reminders don't rely on ElephantBell staying open in the background at all — they're handed off to Android's own alarm clock and location services, the same systems every alarm and maps app depends on. That makes them far more resilient to phone battery managers than App-based monitoring.
Let us know what's happening and we'll help you sort it out.
Email elephantbell.app@gmail.com