Urgent Reminders With Alarms On iPhone

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can set an alarm in the Reminders App. 

So there is a new feature in the Reminders App on the iPhone that's going to make a lot of people really happy. In addition to being able to set a reminder and have a notification when the time comes you can now also have an Alarm on the iPhone go off. This acts just like an alarm in the Clock App but it is not for the Clock App at all. It is part of Reminders. The idea here is that if you have a very important thing in Reminders you can make sure that you don't miss it. It's going to act like an alarm and is going to keep going until you dismiss it. It also has other features like Snooze. 

So when you first use Reminders starting with iOS 26.2 you should get a message about this new feature and it should ask you if you want to enable it. If you miss that message you can always go back into Settings and then scroll down to Apps. Then go to Reminders and look for the option here to have Alarms. Make sure that is turned On. 

Now when you go to the Reminders App and go to create a new reminder, I'll do one specifically in this Reminders List here, you can create the reminder as normal. I'll just create a test one here. Then you can either click on the Calendar button there or the Details button there and you can set a Date and Time to get a notification about that reminder. 

Now there is the new feature here, Urgent. If you turn that on, of course Date and Time automatically go on but you can go back to them and change them. Like change the date or you can change the time. Let me set this one to go off really soon. Then you can add your notes, URL, and other things about this reminder. 

Now you'll see the reminder set there and it has a little symbol there showing an alarm associated with it. You can, of course, go back anytime you want into here and then change the details and turn off Urgent there to not have it sound the alarm. To only do just a normal notification. 

So with the iPhone locked or maybe sitting on your desk, maybe in your pocket, you'll get an alarm very much like getting an alarm from the Clock App. It will look like this. There you go. Notice the distinctive blue color there of the big Snooze button. It is a big differentiation between this and an alarm from the Clock App. Now, you can slide here to stop it like you can with the alarm from the Clock App. Or you can tap Snooze to snooze. You'll see the reminder there, snooze, it's got the Snooze timer countdown and a reschedule button as well. But also underneath it there's a little circle there you can check to basically delete that item. 

Here's what happens if we tap the Reschedule button there. You can see it takes you right back to a custom view of the date and time and the Urgent switch for that reminder. 

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So I've reset this one to be five minutes later. But this time I'm going to go into Settings and back here under Reminders in Settings there's another setting we can look at that's further down on the screen here. It's Complete for Alarm. If you turn this On now instead of getting the option to Snooze you just get the option to mark the item as Complete.

Now let's look at what happens when apps start off. So you can see how you just have a big Complete button and Slide to Stop. If I tap Complete it will complete the item. But if I Slide To Stop, like this, then you can see I go into this mode here and it just shows me when it was due. There's a Reschedule Button and I can still complete it here. Otherwise I skip the alarm at this point. It is just going to remind me again.

So I think it is obvious what this is really for. It is for Reminders that are very important and cannot be missed. You don't want to rely on a simple notification to tell you that it is time to do something. But at the same time you don't want to set an alarm. Remember, reminders can be set for any time in the future. Whereas alarms really work on a weekly basis. You can set one for tomorrow morning, or you can set one for Tuesday and Thursday at a certain time, that kind of thing. A Reminder can have a specific date way in the future with a specific time. Now you get something very much like an alarm but for that specific thing. Reminders can also have a lot more information attached to them. There can be the title of the Reminder, the notes for it, a URL, you can attach images. There are all sorts of different things you can do with a reminder and they are pretty easy to reuse as well. 

There's also are Repeating Options too. It may be interesting for some people to have a repeating reminder with that Urgent Alarm also assigned to it. There's definitely overlap now between the Clock App and its alarms and the Reminders App and its alarms. But I think that each has its distinct uses as well. Thanks for watching.