Not receiving notifications? The complete checklist

My moon apps - Moon Phase Calendar Plus and Full Moon Phase - deliver their alerts through Apple's standard notification system, and that system has quite a few settings on your device (not in the app) that can silence, delay, or hide notifications. If your alerts aren't arriving, or arrive without a sound, one of the items below is almost always the reason. Please work through them in order - the most common causes are at the top.

1. Check notifications are allowed for the app

When you first opened the app, your iPhone asked whether the app may send you notifications. If Don't Allow was tapped - easy to do by accident - your device will never show an alert from the app, even though everything inside the app looks switched on.

1. Close the app and open the iPhone Settings app.
2. Go to Notifications, scroll down the app list, and tap the app's name.
3. Make sure Allow Notifications is turned ON.
4. On the same screen, check the three alert types - Lock Screen, Notification Centre, and Banners - are all ticked.
5. Make sure Sounds is turned ON. If this is off, notifications appear silently.
6. If you see a Deliver Immediately or Immediate Delivery option, select it.

Important: if you have just switched Allow Notifications back on, please also open the app once afterwards. That lets the app rebuild its schedule of upcoming alerts.

2. Check Scheduled Summary isn't holding your alerts back

iPhones have a feature called Scheduled Summary which quietly collects notifications and delivers them in a bundle at set times of day, rather than the moment they happen. A moon alert that arrives eight hours late in a summary is easy to miss entirely - and because exact-moment alerts often occur overnight, this feature can swallow them completely.

1. Open Settings → Notifications → Scheduled Summary.
2. If Scheduled Summary is ON, look at the list of apps included in the summary.
3. Make sure the moon app is turned OFF in that list, so its alerts are delivered immediately - or turn off Scheduled Summary entirely if you don't use it.

3. Check Focus modes (Do Not Disturb, Sleep, Work, Driving)

Focus modes silence notifications while they're active - and some turn themselves on automatically. The Sleep focus is a particularly common culprit for moon alerts, because full and new moons frequently occur in the middle of the night, exactly when Sleep focus is silencing your phone.

1. Swipe down from the top-right corner of the screen (or up from the bottom on older iPhones) to open Control Centre.
2. Look for a button that says Focus, Do Not Disturb, Sleep, or Work. If one is highlighted, a focus is active - tap it once to turn it off.
3. Also check Settings → Focus: tap each focus you use, and either add the moon app to its Allowed Apps, or look at its Schedule section to see whether it switches itself on automatically. The Sleep focus in particular follows your bedtime schedule in the Health app.
4. Note that Share Across Devices (on the main Focus screen) means a focus turned on from your iPad or Mac silences your iPhone too.

4. Check the silent switch, Action button, and volume

• Older iPhones have a small mute switch on the left edge - if you can see orange, the phone is silenced.
• Newer iPhones (iPhone 15 Pro onward) have an Action button instead. Check Settings → Sounds & Haptics (or the bell icon in Control Centre) to confirm the phone isn't in Silent mode.
• Notification sounds follow the ringer volume, not the media volume. Press the volume-up button, then check Settings → Sounds & Haptics and drag the Ringtone and Alert Volume slider up. The Change with Buttons setting decides whether the side buttons affect this volume at all.

5. Check where the sound is going

• If your phone is connected to Bluetooth headphones, a speaker, a hearing aid, or your car, the alert sound may be playing there instead of from the phone.
• If you wear an Apple Watch, notifications often go to the watch instead of the phone: when the phone is locked and the watch is on your wrist, the alert appears and chimes on the watch only. This is normal Apple behaviour, and it's very easy to miss a quiet tap on the wrist. Check the watch's Notification Centre (swipe down on the watch face) to see whether the alerts have been arriving there all along.

6. Check Screen Time isn't blocking the app

If you use Screen Time with Downtime, notifications from apps that aren't in your Always Allowed list are silenced during downtime hours. Check Settings → Screen Time → Downtime, and Always Allowed, if you use this feature.

7. Open the app from time to time

The apps plan their alerts up to four months in advance - Apple doesn't allow apps to schedule further ahead than that, and the schedule can only be refreshed when the app is opened. Please open the app:

• after a long break from using it,
• after getting a new phone or restoring from a backup,
• after a major iOS update,
• after travelling to a different time zone, and
• after changing any notification permissions in the iPhone Settings.

Simply opening the app is enough - it rebuilds the full schedule automatically. Fully closing the app afterwards is fine; the alerts are handled by iOS and don't need the app to be running.

8. Know which alerts each app sends

Moon Phase Calendar Plus - see Settings (bottom-right tab) → Notification Settings inside the app:

• Full Moon Notifications and New Moon Notifications are available to everyone and send an alert 24 hours before each event.
• Notify 12 hours before, Notify at the Exact Moment, Quarter Moon Notifications, and Howling Notifications (the wolf howl sound) are Premium features and need an active subscription - the Settings tab will say "Premium Enabled".

Full Moon Phase:

• Sends an alert with a chime 24 hours before each full moon and new moon, plus an alert whenever the moon moves into a new astrological sign. These are set up when you allow notifications during the app's welcome screens.

If you have both apps installed, you will receive an alert from each - they are deliberately staggered a few seconds apart so both can be heard.

And keep in mind the moon's own schedule: a full moon and a new moon each happen only once a month, and the exact moment frequently falls overnight. If you have just switched on exact-moment alerts, the first one may be a few weeks away - that's the moon, not a fault!

Still not working?

If you've been through everything above and alerts still aren't arriving, please contact me and mention which of the steps you've already checked. Screenshots of Settings → Notifications for the app, and of the app's own notification settings screen, help enormously.