Why Your Alerts Aren't Arriving

You set an alert at $60,000. Bitcoin traded through $60,000. Your phone said nothing, and you found out from a group chat two hours later.

This is the most annoying failure a tracker can have, because it fails silently. A portfolio number that is wrong looks wrong. An alert that never arrives looks exactly like a quiet market. You have no way to tell the difference until you go looking, which is usually after the thing you wanted to know about has already happened.

The good news is that the causes are few and the diagnosis is quick. In almost every case the alert engine did its job and something between the server and your lock screen swallowed the result.

Did the alert actually fire, or was the level never reached?

Check this first, always. It costs ten seconds and it decides which half of the problem you are in.

Open the alerts screen and look at the triggered history. If the alert shows as triggered at a time when you got nothing, you have a delivery problem and everything below applies. If it shows as still active, the price never reached your level and the app behaved correctly.

That second case is more common than people expect, and the reason is usually the gap between the price you saw and the price your alert was watching. A candle wick on one exchange is not the same as the aggregated price a tracker uses. If Bitcoin printed $59,980 on the venue in your chart app and your alert sat at $60,000 on an aggregated feed, nothing fired and nothing was wrong. Why the same coin shows two different prices covers why those two numbers diverge and by how much.

The other version of this is a percentage alert measuring from a different starting point than you assumed. A 10% move measured from a rolling 24-hour window and a 10% move measured from where you set the alert are different events. Price alerts vs. percentage alerts explains which one you actually want.

Has your phone been told the app is allowed to interrupt you?

If the alert fired, start at the operating system's permission layer. This is the single most common cause, and it is usually the result of tapping past a permission prompt during setup.

On iOS, open Settings, tap Notifications, scroll to the app and confirm Allow Notifications is on. Then look at what is enabled underneath it. An app can hold notification permission while being set to badge only: no banner, no sound, no lock screen entry, nothing in Notification Centre. The alert arrives, updates a number on the app icon, and you never see it. Make sure Lock Screen and Banners are both ticked under Alerts, and that Sounds is on if you want to hear anything.

On Android, the path is Settings, then Notifications, then App notifications, then the app. Android splits notifications into categories, and each category has its own switch. An app can be allowed to send notifications in general while the specific category your price alerts belong to is turned off. That is a genuinely easy setting to hit by accident, usually by long-pressing a notification and choosing to turn off that kind rather than snoozing it. Check the categories individually rather than trusting the master toggle.

If you have recently restored to a new handset, check this before anything else. Notification permission does not always survive a migration, and neither does the per-category state. Restoring your tracker on a new phone covers the rest of that checklist.

Is a Focus mode or a notification summary holding the alert?

Focus modes are designed to do exactly what you are complaining about. That is the point of them, and the fix is not to switch them off.

On iOS, go to Settings, then Focus, and check each mode you actually use. Sleep and Work are the usual culprits. Every mode has an app list where you decide which apps are allowed through, and adding the tracker there means alerts reach you during Sleep while nothing else does. If you would rather keep the mode strict, most alerts can still break through when the app marks them Time Sensitive, which you enable per app under Settings, Notifications, then the app.

The second iOS mechanism catches far more people, because it is on by default for some users and almost nobody remembers agreeing to it. Under Settings, Notifications, Scheduled Summary, iOS collects notifications from selected apps and delivers them in a batch at set times. A price alert delivered in the 6pm digest is not an alert. It is a history lesson. If the tracker appears in the app list there, remove it.

Android's equivalent lives under Do Not Disturb, and on recent versions under Modes, which extends the same idea to Bedtime and Driving. Each mode carries its own exception list. Add the tracker to the allowed apps rather than disabling the mode entirely, or you will end up turning the mode off permanently and getting woken by everything.

Why does Android deliver everything at once when I unlock the phone?

Because the system decided your app was not worth waking the radio for, and queued its notifications until something else woke it anyway.

Android aggressively suspends background work to protect battery. Doze and Adaptive Battery both learn which apps you rarely open and progressively deprioritise them, and a tracker you check twice a day is a natural target. The result is not a lost notification but a late one, which for a price alert amounts to the same thing.

Fixing it takes three settings. Long-press the app icon, open App info, tap Battery, and set battery usage to Unrestricted. In the same App info screen, open the mobile data entry and make sure background data usage is allowed. Then go to Settings, Battery, Adaptive Battery, and either turn it off or confirm the app is not being restricted by it.

Manufacturer skins add a second layer on top of stock Android, and it is separate from the settings above. Samsung keeps a sleeping-apps list under Device care, Battery. Xiaomi, OPPO, OnePlus and Huawei each maintain their own autostart or protected-apps list, and an app absent from it gets frozen regardless of what the standard Android battery setting says. If you are on one of those devices and the stock settings did not help, that list is where the problem is. The site dontkillmyapp.com documents the exact path per manufacturer and is kept current.

What order should I check these in?

Work down this list and stop when notifications start arriving.

1. Check the triggered history. Fired but silent means a delivery problem. Still active means the level was never reached, and there is nothing to fix.
2. Send yourself a test. Set a price alert a fraction of a percent above the current price of a liquid asset, the same way you would set any price alert. It should fire within a minute or two and tells you immediately whether delivery works at all.
3. Check system notification permission, including the alert styles underneath it on iOS and the individual categories on Android.
4. Check Focus, Do Not Disturb and Modes, and add the app to the allowed list rather than disabling the mode.
5. Check Scheduled Summary on iOS. Remove the tracker from it.
6. Set battery usage to Unrestricted on Android, allow background data, and clear the manufacturer's own power-saving list.
7. Reinstall as a last resort. This forces a fresh permission prompt and a fresh push token. Your alerts live with your account, so you lose nothing.

Most people find it at step three or step six.

Once delivery is reliable, the failure mode flips. You stop missing alerts and start receiving too many, which is a different problem with a different fix. The five-alert rule is about deciding which alerts deserve to reach a phone that now works properly, and it is worth reading the week after you fix this rather than the week after you set thirty of them.