Alarms and Reminders for Windows Phone 8

[ This article is for Windows Phone 8 developers. If you’re developing for Windows 10, see the latest documentation. ]

A scheduled notification is a dialog box that pops up on the screen at a specified time, similar to the notifications displayed by the phone’s built-in applications. The dialog box displays some customizable text information to the user and allows the user to dismiss the notification or postpone it until later. If the user taps the notification, the application that created it is launched. Notifications can be configured to launch once or multiple times on a recurring schedule.

There are two types of scheduled notifications, Alarm and Reminder. An Alarm allows you to specify a sound file to play when the notification is launched. When you create a Reminder, you can specify a relative navigation URI pointing to a page in your application, including query string parameters. When the Reminder is displayed to the user and the user taps on it, your application is launched and is passed the URI that you specified. Note that there is a limit of 50 Alarms or Reminders at a time per application.

Warning

Alarms and Reminders are accurate only within a range of one minute. In other words, the notification can be launched up to one minute after it was scheduled.

Alarms

The following image represents an Alarm:

The Alarm UI has the following properties:

  • Displays the name of the app that created the Alarm. You set the app name in the WMAppManifest.xml file.

  • Always shows the text "Alarm" as the UI title.

  • Displays a content area with text generated by the app.

  • Can use an alarm sound set by the app. The sound begins quietly and gradually increases in volume.

  • When the user taps dismiss, the current Alarm is terminated. Note that the Alarm can repeat based on the alarm's schedule.

  • When the user taps snooze, the Alarm is rescheduled to restart in 9 minutes.

Reminders

The following image represents a Reminder:

The Reminder UI has the following properties:

  • Displays the name of the application that created the Reminder.

  • Displays a title that is provided by the application.

  • Displays a content area with text provided by the application.

  • Uses the default notification sound for the device.

  • When the user taps the Reminder, outside of the snooze and dismiss buttons, the application is launched. Optionally, the application can provide navigation URI and query string parameters to which the application will navigate when it is launched.

Creating alarms and reminders

For more info about how to create alarms and reminders, see How to create alarms and reminders for Windows Phone 8.

See Also

Reference

Alarm

Reminder

Other Resources

Tiles and notifications for Windows Phone 8