Help · Android

Oarly isn’t ringing on my Android phone

Almost every time, the reason is the same: your phone stopped Oarly, so nothing we send can reach it. Below are the six causes we see, in the order we actually see them, not the order the internet usually lists them in. Work down from the top and stop when your calls come back.

Do this first

Open Oarly once, right now.

Just opening the app puts everything back. From that moment your phone can receive calls again. That fixes today. The rest of this page is how you stop it happening again.

Cause 1

Your phone stopped Oarly

Why this stops calls: While an app is stopped, Android hands it nothing at all: no reminders, no calls, whatever we send and however urgently we send it. Nothing on the handset can wake it back up. Only opening the app brings it back.

This is the single biggest cause, and it is not a bug on your phone or ours. It is Android doing what it was told. Almost every time, the reason it was allowed to happen is the setting in cause 2, so start there.

Closing Oarly from your recent apps

On a lot of phones this is harmless: the app closes and the next reminder still rings. There are two situations where it isn’t, and between them they cover most handsets.

Some phones stop the app outright. Samsung, Xiaomi and Huawei are the usual names: swiping an app away doesn’t close it, it switches it off. They keep exemptions for a handful of very large apps (the ones everyone would complain about), and a reminder app isn’t on that list. dontkillmyapp.com tracks the behaviour phone by phone.

And on any phone, if Oarly is restricted from background activity (cause 2), closing it switches it off until you next open it by hand, whatever make of phone you have.

What to do: fix cause 2 first. It is the bigger of the two, it helps on every phone, and on many it makes this stop mattering entirely. If you have a Samsung, Xiaomi or Huawei, it is worth also keeping Oarly out of the swipe:

Samsung: Open recent apps, tap the Oarly icon at the top of its card, then tap “Lock this app”. A small padlock appears and “Close all” will skip it.
Xiaomi, Redmi & POCO: Open recent apps, press and hold the Oarly card, then tap the padlock. Locked apps survive “clear all”.
Huawei & Honor: Open recent apps, swipe down on the Oarly card (or tap its padlock icon) to lock it.

Your phone’s battery manager stopped it by itself

Some phones stop apps on a schedule, without asking and without telling you. We watched one do it: a OnePlus handset stopped Oarly at 23:00 every single night, on its own, and calls stopped arriving until the phone was picked up the next morning. Nobody had touched anything.

You can’t switch that behaviour off directly on most phones. What you can do is take Oarly off the list of apps it applies to, which is cause 2, below. An app that’s allowed to run in the background is far less likely to be stopped in the first place, so if you only do one thing on this page, do that one.

Cause 2

Oarly isn’t allowed to run in the background

Why this stops calls: This is a complete blackout, not a delay. Google’s own documentation is explicit about it: when you restrict an app’s background use, messages are simply not delivered to it. Oarly can be online, paid up and working perfectly, and your phone will still never be told that a call is waiting.

This setting has different names on different phones, and it changes name between Android versions on the same phone: “Restricted”, “Background activity”, “Background restriction”, “Allow background usage”. Sometimes it’s a switch, sometimes a choice of three. You want Oarly set to Unrestricted, or its background activity allowed, whichever your phone offers. That is also why Oarly itself doesn’t quote a name at you: it reads the setting off your phone and asks for it in plain words. The exact paths are below.

Pixel & stock Android: Settings → Apps → Oarly → App battery usage → choose “Unrestricted”. On Android 14 and 15 this screen is a single “Allow background usage” switch: leave it on, then tap its label (not the switch) to reveal Unrestricted.
Samsung: Settings → Apps → Oarly → Battery → choose “Unrestricted”. Older One UI versions show a single “Allow background activity” switch instead; turn it on.
OnePlus, OPPO & Realme: Settings → Battery → Battery usage → Oarly → set “Allow background activity”, and turn “Allow auto launch” on. Older versions call this “App battery management”.
Xiaomi, Redmi & POCO: Settings → Apps → Manage apps → Oarly → Battery saver → “No restrictions”. On the same screen, turn “Autostart” on.
Huawei & Honor: Settings → Battery → App launch → Oarly → turn “Manage automatically” off, then switch all three on: Auto-launch, Secondary launch, Run in background. EMUI blocks background activity hard by default, so all three matter.
vivo & iQOO: Settings → Battery → Background power consumption management → Oarly → “Allow high background power consumption”. Then Settings → More settings → Applications → Autostart → turn Oarly on.

One extra check on Huawei: the settings above are the fix, and on EMUI they matter more than on most phones. But Huawei models released from late 2019 onwards ship without Google services, and Oarly’s calls travel over Google’s delivery network. So if your Huawei has no Play Store, no battery setting will help. Honor has been a separate company since 2020 and its phones do have Google services, so the steps above work there normally.

Oarly can take you straight to the right screen: open Oarly, go to Settings → Notifications, and tap anything flagged there. It only shows you the settings your particular phone actually needs.

Cause 3

Call notifications are switched off, or set to silent

Why this stops calls: Oarly rings through one dedicated notification category, called “Incoming calls”. If that category is turned off (or left on but set to Silent), the call still arrives, but with no sound and no permission to take over your screen. It waits quietly in your notification tray while your phone stays dark.

Go to Settings → Apps → Oarly → Notifications and check three things:

Notifications for Oarly are switched on at all.
In the list of categories below, Incoming calls is on, and set to Alerting rather than Silent.
Oarly is allowed to show calls full-screen. It lives under Settings → Apps → Special app access → Full-screen notifications on most phones; some call it “Allow full-screen intents”. Without it a call can only be a notification, never a ringing screen.

Worth checking even if you never touched it: some phones quieten notification categories on their own, dropping them to a low priority when they decide an app is interrupting too much, and a category set that low can’t ring over your screen. If calls stopped for no reason you can think of, look here before anywhere else.

Cause 4

Battery saving is putting Oarly to sleep

Why this stops calls: A sleeping app is treated much like a stopped one: your phone holds messages back, or drops them, to save power. Because Oarly spends almost all its time doing nothing while it waits for your next reminder, these features often decide it’s unused, and it’s exactly the app you don’t want asleep.

Cause 2 handles most of this. These are the extra switches that catch people out:

Samsung: Settings → Battery → Background usage limits → check “Sleeping apps” and “Deep sleeping apps”, and remove Oarly from both. Then turn “Put unused apps to sleep” off.
Pixel & stock Android: Settings → Battery → Adaptive Battery. Leaving it on is fine as long as Oarly is set to Unrestricted in cause 2. If calls are still late, try it off for a few days.
Xiaomi, Redmi & POCO: Settings → Apps → Manage apps → Oarly → turn “Autostart” on. Without it your phone won’t let Oarly start when a call arrives.
Huawei & Honor: Settings → Battery → App launch → Oarly → turn “Manage automatically” off, then switch all three on. This is the same screen as cause 2.
Any phone: Turn off Battery saver, or exempt Oarly from it if your phone allows that. Battery saver delays notifications for everything.

Being straight with you: on some phones these lists re-add apps by themselves after a while, and there is no setting that stops them for good. Keeping Oarly set to Unrestricted is what makes it rare.

Your phone decided Oarly was unused

This one is separate from everything above, and it catches a reminder app particularly badly. Android watches for apps you haven’t opened in a few months, then takes their permissions away and puts them in the same stopped state as cause 1. Oarly is an easy target, because a reminder service works best when you never open it: a phone that has been calling you reliably since spring can quietly decide the app is abandoned.

It is one switch, and its name is the whole difficulty. It changed twice between Android 11 and Android 13, Samsung uses its own wording, and because it ships as part of Google’s permissions component it can be renamed on your phone without an Android update. Look for a row that mentions unused, and either pausing the app or removing its permissions.

Pixel & stock Android 13+: Settings → Apps → Oarly → Unused app settings → turn “Pause app activity if unused” off.
Pixel & stock Android 12: Settings → Apps → Oarly → turn “Remove permissions and free up space” off. Same feature, earlier name.
Samsung: Settings → Apps → Oarly → turn “Remove permissions if app isn’t used” off. On some One UI versions the row sits on Oarly’s Permissions screen instead of its app page.
Android 11 and older: Settings → Apps → Oarly → Permissions → turn “Remove permissions if app isn’t used” off. Google added the feature to older phones through Play services, so it can be there on a phone that never got Android 12.
Any phone: Oarly asks you for this during setup, and only when your phone reports it switched on. So if setup never mentioned it, your phone either doesn’t have it or you have already turned it off, and there is nothing to find.

Opening Oarly once resets the clock, so simply using the app now and then is enough on its own. The switch is for the months when you don’t, which is exactly when you are relying on it most.

Cause 5

Do Not Disturb or a Focus mode is silencing it

Why this stops calls: Do Not Disturb and the various bedtime, focus and driving modes are designed to keep your screen dark and your phone quiet. They do that to a Oarly call as effectively as to anything else: the call arrives, and your phone deliberately says nothing.

Worth checking especially if calls come through fine in the daytime and go missing overnight or during work hours. That pattern is almost always a schedule.

Pixel & stock Android: Settings → Notifications → Do Not Disturb → Apps → Add apps → Oarly. Then check Settings → Digital Wellbeing for a Focus mode or Bedtime mode on a schedule.
Samsung: Settings → Notifications → Do not disturb → Apps → allow Oarly. Then check Settings → Modes and Routines for anything running on a timer.
Any phone: Pull down your quick settings and look for a moon, a star, or a mode name lit up at the top of the screen.

Cause 6

The phone can’t get online

Why this stops calls: A Oarly call travels over the internet to the app. There’s no phone number and no text message involved. No connection, no call. It’s the least common cause on this list, but the easiest to rule out.

Check Wi-Fi or mobile data is on and aeroplane mode is off. If the phone is on Wi-Fi but the Wi-Fi has no working internet, calls won’t arrive.
If you use a VPN, or an app that filters ads by changing your DNS, turn it off for a moment and try a test call. Some of them quietly block the connection your phone uses for notifications.
On an office, school or hotel network, a firewall may be blocking the connection Android keeps open for notifications (ports 5228 to 5230). If you can, test on mobile data instead; if it works there and not on that network, that’s your answer, and whoever runs the network can unblock it.

Check it worked

Don’t take our word for it. Make it ring.

A test call with Oarly open on screen proves almost nothing. To test the thing that actually goes wrong, put the phone back in the state it’s in at 7am: lock the screen, put the phone down, and let a real reminder come in. If it rings from a locked screen you’re fixed. That is also the honest test of whether cause 2 is properly set.

It’s also worth knowing what Oarly does when a call goes unanswered: it tries again, several times over the following minutes, rather than giving up on the first ring. What no amount of retrying can do is reach a phone that isn’t listening. The call is sent to your phone, so a phone that has stopped Oarly, or blocked its background use, receives nothing at all, however many times we send it. That is why cause 1 is cause 1, and why cause 2 is the one fix to do first.

Still not working?

Write to us and we’ll look at your phone’s actual record.

We can see whether a call reached your phone and what happened to it, so you don’t have to guess. Email hello@oarly.app and tell us:

the make and model of the phone, and its Android version;
the email address on your Oarly account;
roughly when a call should have come through and didn’t.

One last honest note. Some phone makers don’t give you a way to switch these behaviours off completely, and we can’t override them from our side; nobody can. What is always true is that opening Oarly restores everything immediately, and that a phone left Unrestricted with Oarly in its recent apps very rarely has this problem at all.