iOS 26.2 added an Urgent setting to Apple Reminders that rings like an alarm, even on silent. How to turn it on, and what happens after it rings.
Since iOS 26.2, Apple's Reminders app can ring like an alarm. Open a reminder, tap the info button, and under Date & Time turn on Urgent. When the reminder is due, your iPhone plays an alarm instead of a notification, and it rings even if the phone is on silent or a Focus is on.
Before this, a reminder in Apple Reminders was always a notification. One sound, one banner, and if your phone was on silent or you were in Do Not Disturb, it could pass without you noticing. That's fine for most reminders. It isn't fine for the few you can't miss, like leaving for the airport or taking a tablet on time.
You need iOS 26.2 or later. Apple's support page for Reminders covers the reminder itself. You also have to let Reminders use alarms once, which MacRumors walks through.
If the reminder has no date or time yet, turning on Urgent sets it to the next hour, so check the time before you close it.
It behaves like an alarm from the Clock app. It fills the lock screen, plays sound through silent mode and Focus, and you either snooze it or slide to stop it. Apple built this on AlarmKit, the same system that lets other apps set real alarms since iOS 26. We covered that change in an earlier post.
Two details catch people out:
Keep Urgent for the few things where being late costs you something: a flight, an appointment, medication, picking someone up from school. If every reminder rings like an alarm, you'll start stopping them without reading them, and then the important one gets stopped too.
When you stop an urgent reminder, that's the end of the alarm. The reminder sits in your list, not done, and getting back to it is up to you.
For a lot of people that's where things go wrong. The alarm rings at a moment you can't act on it. You're driving, or in a meeting, or halfway through something else. You stop it and mean to come back, and later you've forgotten there was anything to come back to. A louder alert doesn't fix that, because the problem was never that you didn't hear it. We wrote more about this in reminders that won't go away until you do them.
Nudge is our app, and this is our blog, so read this part with that in mind.
Nudge is a reminder app that keeps checking in until it's done. The difference from Apple Reminders is what happens after the first reminder. If a task passes its deadline and you haven't marked it done, Nudge doesn't go quiet. It checks back the next day, again on day 3, and a last time on day 7, between 8am and 9pm your time. That's the Free plan with the default Steady setting. Set a task to Persistent and it checks back four times, or to Light for two. On Pro, Nudge plans the follow-ups itself and can keep going for up to 14 days. If you dismiss the follow-ups twice, it drops the subject.
Before the deadline, Nudge reminds you as the date gets close. With the default setting that's up to four days: about 6 days before, 3 days before, the day before and on the day. Set to Persistent, it starts 14 days out. These fit around your quiet hours and your other reminders that day. If you want more than that, ask for it: "remind me at 9, 1 and 5 today" sets all three.
Nudge also has real alarms. On an iPhone with iOS 26 or later, you can switch any task's reminder from a notification to an alarm, one time or repeating on the days you pick. An Alarms screen shows whether each one rang, was snoozed, was missed, or wasn't delivered, so you can check instead of wondering.
You add tasks by typing or talking in plain words, like "remind me to call the landlord at 5", and Nudge sets up the task and the time. There's also a web app at app.usenudge.ai, which is how Android users use Nudge. It sends browser notifications but can't ring alarms.
Alarms and follow-ups are both on the Free plan.
Nudge reads your calendar and learns your patterns, then holds each reminder until a moment you can use.