PalomaiPhone location reminders not working?
Location reminders fail quietly. Nothing errors, nothing warns you — the notification just never arrives, or it lands a mile past the place it was for. Here are the eight causes worth checking, most likely first.
Location Services is off for Reminders
Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services, then find Reminders. If it reads Never, no location reminder will ever fire. Reminders doesn't ask for this in the app, so it can sit off for years without a single warning.
Precise Location is turned off
On the same screen, under Reminders. With Precise Location off, iOS reports a broad area instead of a point, and a boundary drawn around your house has nothing accurate enough to compare against.
Low Power Mode is throttling the background
Low Power Mode cuts background activity, and geofence crossings are background work. If the battery icon is yellow through your whole commute, the crossing can land late or not at all.
A Focus swallowed the notification
The reminder can fire exactly on time and still be delivered silently, with no banner and no sound. Pull down Notification Center and look for a reminder you never saw. If it's sitting there, the trigger worked and the Focus filter is the problem.
You never crossed the boundary
A geofence fires on a crossing, not on a check of where you are. Setting "remind me when I get home" while you're already home arms a boundary you're standing inside — nothing fires until you leave and come back.
You have more than 20 location reminders
iOS watches at most 20 regions per app. Past that, some quietly stop being monitored, and there's no list of which ones got dropped. Clearing out finished location reminders is the fix. This limit applies to every app, Paloma included.
The radius is smaller than iOS can resolve
Region monitoring works at roughly a hundred metres, and it locates you from Wi-Fi and cell towers rather than continuous GPS. A tight radius around your driveway doesn't buy precision, it just misses more often. Wider is more reliable.
You combined a time and a place
Apple Reminders treats these as either/or. "Remind me at 6pm when I get home" quietly resolves to one trigger, usually the clock, and the arrival half never happens.
Still missing after all eight?
Then it's not your settings. Apple's location reminders have been dropping alerts since they shipped in 2011, and the pattern hasn't changed: fires early, fires late, or fires into silence. Paloma is a separate app built around this one trigger.
Arrival alerts are Time Sensitive
Paloma marks them the way Apple intends for alerts that only matter here and now, so a Focus doesn't quietly hold them back. It's cause four above, closed off.
A time and a place, from one sentence
"Water the plants when I'm home tonight" gets both: the arrival trigger and the evening reminder. You don't pick one. That's cause eight, closed off.
The radius is yours to set
Every saved place carries its own radius, so you can widen the one that keeps missing instead of guessing at an invisible default.
No "Always" permission needed
Paloma runs its geofences on "While Using the App." Your location is processed on-device and never leaves your phone.
Questions
Does Reminders need the "Always" location permission?
No, and this is the most repeated bad advice about location reminders. iOS wakes an app for a geofence crossing through the notification system, which works on "While Using the App." What breaks location reminders is Location Services being set to Never for Reminders, not the choice between While Using and Always.
How many location reminders can an iPhone watch at once?
iOS monitors up to 20 geofenced regions per app. Past 20 active location reminders, some stop being watched, and nothing tells you which ones. This is a system limit that applies to every app on the phone, including Paloma.
Do location reminders work with Wi-Fi off?
They get less reliable. Region monitoring locates you from Wi-Fi networks and cell towers rather than continuous GPS, so turning Wi-Fi off removes the signal it leans on most and crossings get missed or reported late.
Do location reminders work when the app is closed?
Yes. A registered geofence lives in the system, not in the app, so iOS delivers the notification whether or not the app is running. If nothing arrives while the app is closed, the geofence was never registered or was dropped, not merely paused.
A reminder that actually arrives.
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