Prayer alarm not going off on Android? Why, and how to fix it

When a prayer time reminder arrives late or not at all on Android, the cause is almost always the phone protecting its battery rather than the app getting the time wrong. Android can hold back alarms, block notifications and put apps to sleep. The fix is to let the app schedule exact alarms, allow its notifications, set its battery usage to Unrestricted, exempt it from Do Not Disturb if you use it at prayer times, and avoid force-stopping it.

How Android schedules an alarm

A prayer app doesn't keep running all day waiting for Fajr. It asks Android to wake it at a particular minute, and goes to sleep. Android keeps that request and, when the time comes, gives the app a moment to show its notification.

The catch is that Android offers two kinds of request:

• Exact alarms, which fire at the requested minute even when the phone is idle.
• Inexact alarms, which Android may delay and group with others to save battery, sometimes by several minutes or more when the phone has been lying still.

Since Android 12, apps need a special permission, Alarms & reminders, to set exact alarms, and recent versions of Android often leave it switched off for newly installed apps. An app without it has to fall back to inexact alarms.

Doze, the deep-sleep mode Android enters when the screen has been off and the phone still for a while, is the other half of the story. During Doze, background work is deferred to occasional maintenance windows. Exact alarms of the alarm-clock type still get through; ordinary background tasks wait.

The usual culprits

1. No exact-alarm permission, so reminders are inexact and drift late.
2. Notifications blocked, either for the whole app or just for the reminder category. Since Android 13, apps must ask before they can show notifications at all.
3. Battery optimisation, set to Optimised or Restricted, which lets Android limit the app's background activity.
4. Manufacturer battery savers. Many phone makers add their own layer on top of Android: lists of sleeping or deep-sleeping apps, auto-start controls, or aggressive app killers. These can stop reminders even when Android's own settings are right.
5. Do Not Disturb or bedtime modes, which silence notifications from apps you haven't allowed through. Fajr often falls inside a bedtime schedule.
6. Force stop. Force-stopping an app from Android's settings cancels every alarm it has scheduled, and they stay cancelled until you open the app again.
7. A restart the app didn't handle. Android clears all scheduled alarms when the phone reboots; an app must listen for the restart and schedule them again.

The fix, step by step

Menu names vary a little between phone makers and Android versions, but the path is usually similar.

1. Allow exact alarms. Open Settings → Apps → [your prayer app] → Alarms & reminders and switch it on. (It may be under Special app access.)
2. Allow notifications. In Settings → Apps → [app] → Notifications, make sure notifications are on and the category used for prayer reminders isn't blocked or set to silent.
3. Lift battery limits. In Settings → Apps → [app] → Battery (or App battery usage), choose Unrestricted.
4. Check your manufacturer's extras. Look in the battery or device-care settings for sleeping-app lists, background limits or auto-start, and exempt the app.
5. Let it through Do Not Disturb. In Settings → Notifications → Do Not Disturb, add the app to the apps allowed to interrupt, or adjust your bedtime schedule.
6. Open the app after a force stop or an update, just once, so it can set its alarms again.
7. Test it. Set a reminder for the next prayer, lock the phone, leave it on the table, and see whether it arrives on time.

How Salah Locator handles this

Salah Locator schedules each prayer reminder on the phone, from the timetable of the mosque you chose, so reminders don't need a connection to ring.

• When exact alarms are allowed, each reminder is scheduled as an alarm clock, the most reliable kind Android offers, which Doze doesn't hold back.
• When they aren't, the app falls back to an inexact alarm that may arrive late, and shows an Allow exact alarms card on the mosque's alarm screen with an Open settings button that takes you straight to the permission.
• On Android 13 and later, it asks for notification permission the first time you open a mosque's Prayer alarms screen.
• After a restart or an app update, it sets every reminder again from the times saved on the phone.
• When a mosque changes a time, the app notices the next time you open it, or within about six hours while you're online, moves your reminder, and tells you with a Timing updates notification.

Reminders arrive in the Prayer alarms notification category. Its sound can be changed in Android's notification settings for the app, and the separate Timing updates category can be silenced without affecting the reminders themselves.

Setting one up takes a few taps: open a mosque, tap Alarms, choose Adhan or Iqaamah under Remind me at, and switch on the prayers you want. Each prayer can follow a different mosque. The full walkthrough is in Set up prayer reminders and fix alarms that don't ring.

Still not ringing?

• Is there a time to ring at? A reminder can only follow a time the mosque has published. If the mosque's timetable shows nothing for that prayer, there's nothing to schedule. See Read a mosque's timetable.
• Is it the right time? A reminder at the Adhan and one at the Iqaamah can be many minutes apart. Check which one you chose.
• Is the phone's clock right? Set the date, time and time zone to update automatically.
• Did you travel? Reminders follow the mosque's own time zone, so a reminder for a mosque at home rings at home's prayer time, wherever you are. Set reminders for a mosque near you instead.

A reminder that arrives on time is mostly a matter of permissions. Ten minutes in the settings once is worth years of Fajr alarms that just work. And for trips where the signal may drop, what works offline is worth a read.