Reminders & notifications
How Homestead tells you about things — what arrives, when, and how to make it stop. This page is for people using an instance, not building one. If you're adding notifications to an app, see Notifications instead.
This page covers:
- The two halves: inbox and push
- Turn on push for a device
- Where your notifications live
- Remind me about something
- Reminders your apps set up
- When things arrive
- Why didn't I get one?
The two halves: inbox and push
Every notification is written to your inbox at /notifications. If you've registered a device, it's also pushed to that device as a pop-up.
The important part: the inbox row is written whether or not the push succeeds. No devices registered, phone offline, notification permission revoked, browser cleared its subscription — the message still lands in your inbox and waits for you. Push is best-effort delivery layered on top of a durable record, not the record itself.
So if you've ever wondered whether you missed something: you didn't. It's in the inbox.
Turn on push for a device
Settings → Notifications → Enable on this device.
Your browser will ask permission. Say yes and the device appears in the list, where you can send it a test notification or deregister it.
Registration is per device, per browser. This is the thing that surprises people most. Enabling push on your laptop does not enable it on your phone, and Chrome and Safari on the same machine count separately. Each one has to be turned on where you're sitting. That's a web push constraint, not a Homestead choice — the subscription belongs to the browser.
A few consequences:
- Deregistering a device stops pushes to that one device. Your other devices and your inbox are unaffected.
- If you denied permission, the button can't ask again — browsers only prompt once. You have to re-allow notifications for the site in your browser's own settings, then come back.
- Clearing site data wipes the subscription. The device will quietly stop receiving pushes and you'll need to enable it again.
- Push needs HTTPS (except on
localhost). If your instance is on plainhttp://, the option won't work at all.
If your instance's operator hasn't configured VAPID keys, push won't work for anyone — inbox rows still get written. That's a one-time setup step on the server.
Where your notifications live
/notifications, or the bell in the top bar — which carries a count of unread messages. Two tabs:
Inbox — what has already been delivered. Mark things read as you go, and tap one to jump to whatever it's about — a bin reminder opens Home, an event reminder opens Events.
Scheduled — what's queued for you, soonest first, grouped by day. This is the useful one for answering "what's coming up?", and it's where you cancel something before it fires.
Remind me about something
On the Scheduled tab, hit Remind me.
You give it a title ("Call the plumber"), optionally some details, and a date. The time is optional — leave it blank and it arrives at 9:00 that morning. Reminders you created yourself can be edited or cancelled at any time.
If your instance has Chat set up, you can also just say it:
remind me at 4 tomorrow to take the chicken out
Reminders are for you. You can't schedule one for somebody else, and there's no "remind the household" option. A queued notification is addressed to exactly one person and stored under their account, which is also what keeps yours private. If you want your partner reminded about something, ask them to add it — or use a shared app that raises reminders for everyone who opts in (below).
Reminders your apps set up
Some reminders you don't type — an app works them out from things you've already recorded. These show up in the Scheduled tab with a badge naming the app.
Two are live:
| Reminder | Where you turn it on | When it arrives |
|---|---|---|
| Birthdays and anniversaries | The reminder control on each event: Off · Day of · Week before · Both | 9:00 on the day you picked |
| Bin night | The Remind me toggle on Home | 18:00 the evening before each collection |
Both are per person. Two people can pick different warnings for the same birthday, and only whoever actually wheels the bins out needs the bin reminder. Neither of you sees the other's choice, and turning yours off doesn't affect anyone else.
Cancelling an app's reminder
App-badged rows can be cancelled but not edited. Editing wouldn't stick — the app recalculates the content from the underlying event or pickup date every day, so your change would be overwritten by morning. Tap the badge to jump to the app where the real setting lives.
Cancelling does stick: that particular reminder won't come back tomorrow. But it only cancels that one occurrence. To stop them for good, turn the setting off — which also withdraws any that were already queued.
When things arrive
The queue is checked every minute, so a reminder set for 4:15 arrives at 4:15, not at some fixed morning or evening slot.
If the server was switched off when something came due, it catches up when it starts again — but only up to a point. Anything more than 12 hours late is marked missed instead of being sent. Getting told about last night's bins over breakfast is worse than not being told, and marking it missed means it's visible in your list rather than silently dropped.
A push that fails is retried with a widening gap — a minute, then two, four, eight, then every fifteen — for a little under two hours before the reminder is marked failed. That is deliberately long enough to ride out a restart, a deploy, or a misconfiguration somebody notices and fixes. The inbox row is written either way.
If something didn't reach you, the Scheduled tab says so: anything marked missed or failed is called out at the top of the list with the reason, rather than being quietly filed under Past.
Why didn't I get one?
| What you saw | Most likely reason |
|---|---|
| Nothing on this device, but it's in the inbox | Push isn't enabled on this device — Settings → Notifications |
| Nothing anywhere, not even the inbox | Nothing was scheduled. Check the Scheduled tab: an app reminder only exists if you opted in |
| It stopped working on a device that used to work | Site data cleared, or notification permission revoked in the browser. Re-enable it |
| Marked missed in the Scheduled tab | The instance was down when it came due, by more than 12 hours |
| Marked failed | Delivery kept erroring for nearly two hours. Usually the server side — VAPID keys, or the instance being unreachable. The message is still in your inbox |
| Nobody in the household gets pushes | VAPID keys aren't configured on the server — an operator task, see Notifications |
| An app reminder you cancelled came back | You cancelled the setting's next occurrence but the setting is still on, so the following one was raised. Turn the toggle off |