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Notifications not working on Xiaomi, Redmi and POCO

Xiaomi is stricter with background apps than anyone else: the skin unloads them from memory and will not let them start again until you open them yourself. Below is only what applies to Xiaomi, Redmi and POCO phones on HyperOS and MIUI. Pick your Android version and the list adjusts.

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Settings paths checked against manufacturers’ help pages onPaths checked 26 September 2026Author: Roman PorfirievskyHow we check

Phone brand

Stock Android (Pixel, Motorola)Samsung Xiaomi, Redmi, POCO Huawei, Honor OPPO, realme OnePlus vivo, iQOO Tecno, Infinix

Android versionWhat is wrongApp

Permission to show notificationsStart here
Where to look
Settings → Apps → Manage apps → your app → Notifications.
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
Alarms and remindersStart here
Where to look
Settings → Apps → Manage apps → your app → Other permissions → Alarms and reminders.
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
Battery: remove restrictionsStart here
Where to look
Settings → Apps → Manage apps → your app → Battery saver → No restrictions.
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
AutostartStart here
Where to look
Settings → Apps → Permissions → Background autostart (plain Autostart on MIUI). The same switch also lives inside the Security app.
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
Lock the card in recents
Where to look
Open the recent apps list, pull the card down or press and hold it, then tap the padlock.
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
Notification channel importance
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
Do Not Disturb
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
Background data
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

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 HyperOS and MIUI

HyperOS replaced MIUI from late 2023, but it inherited almost all of the background management logic. So guides written for MIUI mostly work on HyperOS as well: the labels and their place in the menus change, the settings themselves do not.

The key switch here is autostart. Without it an app that has been unloaded from memory cannot start by itself, and there is nobody left to show the reminder. It is also the switch most often off by default.

After a major system update it is worth going through the list again: some battery settings can revert to defaults during the update. If you cannot find an item, the settings search is the quickest route.

Common cases

Notifications only arrive when I open the app

That is a sure sign the skin is unloading the app from memory. While it is on screen, everything works. Minimise it and lock the phone, and it stops, so messages wait for the next launch.

Xiaomi’s own help page lists four things for this case: turn off Battery saver, choose No restrictions for the app, allow autostart, and lock the app in recents. All four are in the list above. Do all of them: one at a time they often fail.

Telegram is silent while other apps get through

Messenger notifications are delivered by Google’s server: it wakes the phone, and the app itself shows the notification. If HyperOS has stopped Telegram completely, nothing is there to show it. So start with the same background autostart and unrestricted battery.

Telegram has two switches of its own: Settings → Notifications and Sounds, at the bottom, Keep-Alive Service and Background Connection. Telegram’s official notification guide suggests turning both on. It also points out a small thing worth checking: a message you have already seen on your computer or another device may not trigger a notification on the phone. More on Telegram itself is in a separate breakdown, and WhatsApp has traps of its own, collected in the WhatsApp breakdown.

The notification is in the shade but not on the lock screen

Xiaomi has a separate permission for that, and it lives not in notification settings but in the app’s Other permissions, the same place as alarms and reminders. You need two items there: Show on Lock screen, and opening new windows while running in the background.

If the notification arrives but neither pops up over other apps nor makes a sound, the channel is the issue instead: that is the channel importance step in the list above.

Pulling down opens Control center instead of notifications

Newer HyperOS versions split the shade in two: pulling down on the left of the status bar shows notifications, on the right it opens Control center. That is how Xiaomi’s help describes it. You can go back to the old layout under Settings → Notifications & status bar → Control center style, although Xiaomi warns that this depends on the model.

Notifications arrive without sound

Xiaomi’s help suggests checking Silent and Do Not Disturb modes first, then the app’s own sound: Settings → Notifications & status bar → App notifications → your app → Sound. Not every app supports a custom notification tone, Xiaomi adds.

One more quirk from the same help: when an app sends several notifications within 15 seconds, the repeats do not vibrate. That is by design, not a fault.

How to check whether it worked

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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