DoseKeeper

A medication reminder for Android that actually rings.

Built after a commercial Bluetooth pill dispenser and its companion app silently failed to fire an alarm, causing a missed dose. This app deliberately owns nothing but your phone: no hardware, no account, no server, no network permission at all.

Why it's built this way

A medication reminder that doesn't fire is worse than no reminder, because you trusted it. Everything here is shaped around that:

• AlarmManager.setAlarmClock(), not setExact or a work queue. It's the only alarm API Android treats as a real user-facing alarm clock: exempt from Doze, unaffected by App Standby buckets, and visible in the status bar.
• A foreground service does the ringing, so a killed activity can't silence it, and it plays on the alarm audio stream so it's audible on silent/vibrate.
• A full-screen intent takes over the lockscreen and turns the screen on. A heads-up notification you can sleep through isn't good enough.
• The alarm screen is native, not Flutter, so it can appear instantly from a cold process without waiting for a Dart engine to start.
• The app surfaces its own failure modes. If exact alarms are blocked or battery optimisation is enabled, the Today screen warns you and links straight to the fix.

Aggressive OEM battery managers

Some Android skins (ColorOS/OxygenOS, MIUI, One UI, and others) kill background apps well beyond stock Android's rules, and are a common cause of missed alarms. After installing, allow the app to run in the background and disable battery optimisation for it. The Today screen flags both if they're not set.

Also allow DoseKeeper to auto-launch / start on boot (on ColorOS: Settings → Apps → DoseKeeper → allow auto launch). Android deletes alarms when the phone restarts, and DoseKeeper re-arms them at boot, but some skins only let it do that with this setting on.

See dontkillmyapp.com for per-manufacturer steps.

Features

• Add medications with multiple times per day and per-weekday schedules

• Full-screen ringing alarm with Taken / Snooze 10 min

• Doses marked taken/skipped, with missed doses detected after a grace period

• Everything stored locally in SQLite

• Persistent, undismissable notification for any dose still outstanding past its grace period, so it can't be swiped away and forgotten

• A GitHub-style adherence grid on the Today screen

• Automatic daily backups to a folder you choose (it survives uninstalling the app), and restore from a backup file

Planned: a dose history view, editing/pausing a medication without deleting it.

Building

flutter pub get
flutter build apk --debug
adb install -r build/app/outputs/flutter-apk/app-debug.apk

Install with adb install -r, which keeps the app's data. Don't use flutter install: it always uninstalls the existing app first, which deletes all your medications and dose history and cancels every alarm. flutter run can do the same if its install fails. Turn on backups in the app (the backup icon) so a mistake like that can be undone.

Requires the Android SDK and Flutter 3.x.

Status

Early. A test alarm has rung once on real hardware, screen-on and locked, and it worked. That's one data point, not proof — verify it on your own device before relying on it, including at least one overnight test, before you drop your existing reminders.

Licence

MIT