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Notifications not working on Tecno and Infinix
Tecno and Infinix belong to the same company, Transsion, and their skins are nearly identical: HiOS and XOS. Background work there is controlled by the built-in Phone Master, which clears memory and decides who may start on their own. Below is only what applies to these phones. Pick your Android version and the list adjusts.
Settings paths checked against manufacturers’ help pages onPaths checked Author: Roman PorfirievskyHow we checkAvailable offline
Not right? Change the choice above and the list rebuilds.
Where to look
Settings → Apps → your app → Notifications. The toggle at the top must be on.
A sketch of the screen. Labels and row order on your phone may differ. Why this gets in the way
Since Android 13 an app has to ask for this separately on first launch. Declining switches off every notification the app has, reminders included, and the dialog never appears again: the only way back is by hand.
Glossary: Notification permission
Where to look
Settings → Apps → Special app access → Alarms and reminders. Or Settings → Apps → your app → the advanced section.
A sketch of the screen. Labels and row order on your phone may differ. Why this gets in the way
Without this permission the system is free to move a reminder: inexact alarms get batched, and the phone wakes once for all of them, sometimes a minute later, sometimes fifteen. Since Android 14 it is no longer granted automatically even to apps that declare it at install time.
Glossary: Exact alarms
Where to look
Settings → App management → App list → your app → Battery → allow running in the background. On the same app screen, turn off stopping the app when idle.
A sketch of the screen. Labels and row order on your phone may differ. Why this gets in the way
Doze puts the phone to sleep once it lies still with the screen off, and standby buckets since Android 9 cut background work for apps you rarely open. An exemption lifts both.
Glossary: Battery optimisation
Where to look
Phone Master → Accelerate → Auto-start management → turn on your app. While in Phone Master, open the menu at the top left → Settings → Protected apps and add it there too.
A sketch of the screen. Labels and row order on your phone may differ. Why this gets in the way
The skin refuses to let the app start after a reboot or after it has been cleared from memory. At that point there is nobody to show the reminder: the app is not running and never learns that the time has come.
Glossary: Autostart
Where to look
Open the recent apps list, tap the small triangle next to the app name above its card and choose to lock it.
Why this gets in the way
On Xiaomi, vivo, OPPO, realme, Tecno and Infinix, clearing the recents list unloads the app entirely, along with everything it had scheduled. A locked card survives that, which is why vivo’s and realme’s own help pages recommend it.
Glossary: Lock in recents
Where to look
Settings → Apps → your app → Notifications → the reminders channel. Set it to urgent, or turn on pop-ups together with sound.
Why this gets in the way
A medium-importance channel arrives silently: the notification is in the shade, the sound is not. An app cannot raise its own importance, only you can, so if you once turned it down this is the only place to put it back.
Glossary: Notification channels
Where to look
Settings → Notifications → Do Not Disturb → Exceptions. Permission to override the mode is granted to a specific channel, not to the whole app.
Why this gets in the way
It does not cancel the notification, it mutes it. If a night schedule runs into your morning, the reminder arrives silently, and from the outside that looks exactly like a reminder that never came.
Glossary: Do Not Disturb
Where to look
Settings → Apps → your app → Mobile data and Wi-Fi → allow background data and allow usage while data saver is on.
Why this gets in the way
This one is about sync rather than the reminders themselves: without background data, records from your other devices only arrive when you open the app. Reminders keep working, because they live in the system rather than on the network.
Glossary: Background data
Only the steps for this case are shown.
The app has notification settings of its own as well. Our guide: Telegram notifications not working on Android: fixes
The app has notification settings of its own as well. Our guide: WhatsApp notifications not working on Android: what to check
List complete
Now test it on a real reminder, instructions below.
Point the phone camera at the code: the same list opens with your choices.
The page address remembers your choice, so you can send the link to whoever has a silent phone: they open it and get the instructions for their model straight away.
The list is generic: it works the same for any app with reminders or alarms, or for a messenger. KIPRI is only mentioned as an example, so substitute whichever app is going quiet on you.
What is different about HiOS and XOS
Tecno and Infinix publish no official step-by-step guide for late notifications: we found none on the brands’ sites or at their service brand Carlcare. So the paths on this page come from an owners’ checklist for HiOS 15 and XOS 15 on the Russian forum 4PDA, cross-checked in threads for several models: Tecno Pova 7 Pro, Spark Slim and Infinix Hot 60 Pro. They were written for Russian-language firmware, so English labels on your phone may be worded differently.
Item names change here even between updates of the same model. One Hot 60 Pro owner lost the per-app power saving management item after updating to XOS 15.1.2. If something is not where it should be, use the settings search and look for it by meaning.
The skin number usually matches the Android version: official spec pages list HiOS 14 as based on Android 14 and XOS 15 as based on Android 15. There are exceptions, though: the Spark 10 Pro shipped with HiOS 12.6 on Android 13.
Common cases
Freezer: the app is frozen and sends nothing
Freezer looks like one more app: an icon on the home screen or in the app list. Tecno’s FAQ describes how apps get into it: you open Freezer, tap + and add the ones you rarely use. If an icon vanished and that app’s notifications stopped at the same time, look there first. The glossary has a short entry on the app freezer.
HiOS and XOS can freeze apps (Freezer). Tecno’s official FAQ suggests adding rarely used apps to it to totally freeze their background process, and Carlcare, the brands’ service network, is blunter: a frozen app won’t run, send notifications or even show on your home screen until you unfreeze it. The Freezer lives on the home screen: long-press an empty spot → Desktop Setting → Other settings to switch its icon on, then open Freezer, pick the app and tap OK.
Fine during the day, silent at night
Look under the battery saving and power consumption section of Settings. Owners recommend turning off sleep mode optimisation there, along with automatic power saving. According to dontkillmyapp, on older HiOS versions sleep optimisation went as far as switching on airplane mode at night.
In the same section, in the usage list below the statistics, you can pick your app and set it to no restrictions, if your firmware has that option.
Notifications only arrive on Wi-Fi
The 4PDA checklist suggests turning off data priority for foreground apps under the SIM and network settings, in network optimisation: judging by its name, the feature gives the app on screen first call on data.
Tecno’s official account on the same forum, answering a similar complaint about email, said the cause is most often restrictions on the operator’s network, and suggested checking notifications with a different network or SIM.
Sources
How to check whether it worked
In the app you care about, set a reminder exactly 15 minutes from now, lock the phone and press the button. You can close this tab: the timer remembers the time and will wait for you.
Leave the phone alone until the countdown ends: unlocking wakes the system and spoils the test.
Time is up. Did the reminder arrive?
The skin is leaving the app alone
If reminders still run late in real life, repeat the test over three hours: some skins only put an app to sleep after a long idle stretch.
What is left is choosing where the reminders live. KIPRI schedules them on the phone itself, so they fire without the internet. Download for Android
The system is shifting the reminder
That is what an inexact alarm or a battery restriction looks like. Start with these steps, change one setting at a time and rerun the test.
The app was not allowed to show it
Either notifications are blocked or the skin stopped the app entirely. Start with these steps, change one setting at a time and rerun the test.
Set a reminder fifteen minutes out, lock the phone and put it face down. Do not touch it: unlocking resets the sleep timer and ruins the test.
Arrives on the second, and you are done. Late or missing, and you go back to the list, change one setting at a time and rerun the same test. That is how you find out which one was in the way.
Fifteen minutes is sometimes not enough: some skins only kill an app after an hour or two of idling. If the quick test passes but real life still runs late, repeat it with a three-hour gap.
And do not install "optimisers" or "boosters" from the app store. They do exactly the thing you are complaining about: close background processes.
If none of it helped
- Check whether notifications from other apps arrive. If the whole phone is quiet, the problem is the system rather than one app: look at your night schedule and reboot.
- Make sure a reminder actually exists, rather than a task with no time on it. That is the most common cause among the ones that have nothing to do with settings.
- If the phone has a work profile or parental controls, restrictions may be set at device policy level, and local settings do not override them.
- And write to the app developer. If the app does not show the status of its own permissions, that is their shortcoming, not yours.
- Instructions for one specific model have been collected for years at dontkillmyapp.com, a community project rather than ours.
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