How to set a reminder on Android without installing anything

Call the clinic on Thursday at 9:00, pay for the internet by the 25th, water the plants on Saturday. Android already has what you need for this, with nothing to install. The confusing part is elsewhere: Google has moved reminders around several times in recent years, and older how-tos from search send you to menu items that are gone.

Below are the ways Google and Samsung describe in their help pages today. Button labels come from the English help pages and may differ slightly on your phone.

What changed at Google

Reminders used to live in separate places: Keep, Assistant, Calendar. Now Google keeps them in one store, and that store is Google Tasks.

Tasks help says that in the second half of 2025 Keep reminders migrate to Google Tasks and new reminders are saved as tasks. You can view and edit them from Calendar, Gemini, Keep and Tasks.
Assistant turns “remind me” into a task as well.
Google no longer has location reminders. For Keep the help page says: “You can no longer create or get location-based reminders.” For Assistant: “The option to set tasks for a certain location is no longer available.”

The practical upshot: whichever of the four Google routes you take, you end up with a task that has a date and a time.

Google Tasks

The most direct route. If the app is not on your phone, it installs from the Play Store, but the same tasks can be created from Calendar, covered below.

Open the Google Tasks app and tap Add task.
Enter a title.
Tap Add date/time, pick the day and hour, then Done.
Tap Save.

The help page warns about two things. You get a notification only if the task has a date and time. And for tasks without a time, “notifications appear at 9 AM.”

Google Calendar

If you have Google Calendar but not Tasks, you do not need a separate app: a task can be created right on the calendar grid.

Open the Google Calendar app.
Tap an empty slot and choose Task. Or tap Add and then Task.
Fill in the title, date and time.
Tap Save at the top right.

Tasks with dates created in the Tasks app show up in Calendar too. If they do not, open the menu and make sure the “Tasks” box is checked. It does not work the other way round: unchecking the box hides tasks from the grid but leaves their notifications on. Those are turned off separately, in Calendar Settings → General → Tasks notifications.

Google Keep: a reminder on a note

Handy when the thing to remember is a piece of text: a shopping list, an address, a booking number.

Open a note or create a new one.
At the top right, tap Remind me.
Under “Pick date & time,” select the time, date and recurrence.
Tap Save.

According to the help page, reminders send notifications at the set date and time and 24 hours after.

The main trap is that Keep no longer does the reminding. Tasks help puts it in one sentence: “You no longer get reminder notifications from Google Keep.” For the notification to arrive, the Calendar or Tasks app has to be installed with notifications allowed. If both are installed, Tasks takes priority.

By voice: Assistant and Gemini

Google Assistant. The example from the help page: “Hey Google, remind me to call Mom at noon tomorrow.” That creates a task in Google Tasks. You can see the list in the Google app: profile picture → Tasks. The time can be changed by voice too: “Hey Google, change my task to buy milk to 5:00 PM.”

Gemini. The help page gives these prompt patterns: “Remind me on [date] at [time] to [task]” and “Add [task] in my to-dos.” Three conditions have to be met:

you are signed in to the Gemini app;
Keep Activity is on, otherwise Gemini cannot connect to Tasks;
Google Workspace is connected to Gemini. If it is not, you get the option to connect it the first time you ask.

To make Gemini write to Tasks specifically, the help page suggests adding @Google Tasks to the prompt. You can undo what was just created with Undo in the confirmation notification.

Google’s own page says Gemini can make mistakes. After a voice command, open Tasks and check the date and time, especially when something depends on the reminder.

Samsung: the Reminder app

Galaxy phones have their own app, and many owners have never seen it. Samsung UK’s guide explains why: the Reminder app “has been hidden on most Samsung devices.” Its route to the app is Calendar → the menu icon → Reminder, after which a shortcut is added to your apps screen. That guide was last updated in October 2022, so the menu may look different on newer One UI versions.

Creating a reminder, per Samsung US: open the Reminder app, tap Add (the plus sign) at the bottom, add the details and tap Save. The UK guide lists what those details are:

Time. Tap Date and time to pick the moment. To make the reminder repeat, tap Don’t repeat and choose a repeat option.
Place. Tap Pick a place and choose whether to be alerted when you arrive or when you leave. Among the ways in this article, it is the only one where a location reminder is still described.
Sound. Tap Ring once to choose between the reminder ringing once or ringing continually.

Samsung US adds that reminders can be synced with Microsoft To Do from the app’s menu.

On the Galaxy S25 or later, and on select Samsung devices running One UI 7 and later, Gemini can create these reminders as well: add @Samsung Reminder to the prompt.

Xiaomi, Redmi, POCO and other brands

We did not find a current Xiaomi help page about reminders, so there are no HyperOS menu paths here: we are not going to invent them. The Google routes in the first four sections work on any phone that has Google apps and do not depend on the manufacturer’s skin.

A repeating reminder

Take a pill every day at 8:00, pay for the internet on the 25th of every month. All of the ways above can repeat.

Tasks and Calendar. Select the date and time, then Repeat. The help page names one limit: “Tasks with subtasks can’t repeat.”
Keep. Recurrence is set in the same place as the date and time.
Samsung. Don’t repeat → a repeat option.

In Calendar a certain number of upcoming instances of a repeating task appear on the grid, and new ones are added as time passes. To move one occurrence without touching the rest, tap the date of the next task in the Tasks app. To change the time for the whole series, tap the repetition info at the bottom. Deleting a single instance is done through Calendar: Delete → This task.

Which chores deserve a repeat and which do not is covered in the article on recurring reminders.

Why a reminder did not fire

First, the causes Google’s own help describes.

Only one app notifies you. A task notification can come from three apps: Google, Google Tasks and Google Calendar. “If multiple apps are installed, only one app notifies you.” So check notifications in the app that is actually sending them. In Tasks: profile picture → Settings → Notifications → All Tasks notifications. For the Google app the path goes through phone settings: Notifications → App Notifications → Google → Tasks. If you cannot find Tasks there, scroll down and tap Show unused categories.

The phone holds notifications back. Google says it plainly: “If you don’t use apps regularly, some Android phones turn off or delay notifications.” The fix from the same page: Settings → Apps → Special app access → Alarms & Reminders → Tasks → Allow setting alarms and reminders. What this permission is, and why a 10:00 reminder turns up at 10:07 without it, is explained in the article on exact reminders on Android.

The task has no time. Then the notification came at 9 AM, and you most likely swiped it away with the rest of the morning batch.

The reminder sits in Keep, and neither Tasks nor Calendar is installed. Nothing is there to show it.

If all of that checks out and notifications are still late or missing, the cause is battery and autostart settings, which differ by brand. The paths for your phone are in the notification settings check. Another common reason for silence is a Do Not Disturb schedule.

If the built-in tools are not enough

We make KIPRI, an Android app for reminders, tasks, birthdays and habits. A reminder in it has five repeat options: every day, weekdays, weekly, monthly and yearly. There is no “every N days” repeat. There is no build to download yet either, so for today the ways above are the dependable choice. How KIPRI handles regular payments is described on the bill reminders page.