For families looking after an elderly parent
You add the medicines once. They see one screen: the time, the medicine, and two big buttons. The alarm takes over the screen and repeats up to five times, five minutes apart, until the dose is confirmed.
Free · Android 8.0 and up · English & Spanish · No ads
It's almost never stubbornness. It's a phone call in the middle of breakfast, a nap that runs long, a new box that looks exactly like the old one.
A paper chart on the fridge doesn't ring. A phone's built-in reminder is one quiet notification, already gone by the time anyone looks at the screen.
DoseBuddy is built for that moment instead: loud, full screen, and it does not give up after one notification.
of people living with a long-term condition do not take their medicines as prescribed.
World Health OrganizationThree steps. Only the first one is your job, and only once.
Add each medicine with a photo of the box, the times it's due, and how many pills come in a pack. A few minutes, once.
At the right time the phone rings and fills the screen: the medicine, the time, and two buttons: Take and Later. Nothing else to find.
Every confirmed dose lands in a calendar on that phone. One look tells you how the week actually went, with no interrogation over dinner.
Turn it on and the app becomes a single screen. No tabs, no menus, no settings to wander into by accident.
Right now DoseBuddy runs entirely on one phone: theirs, or yours if you keep the schedule yourself. It needs no account, no signal and no subscription to do its job.
Sharing one schedule between their phone and yours is the next thing we're building. We're not putting a date on it: reminders that never miss come first, and we'd rather ship it late than ship it half-working.
Meanwhile the app is free, so there's nothing to wait for.
A reminder that quietly stops working is worse than no reminder at all. That's the part of DoseBuddy that gets the most attention.
Exact-time alarms are re-armed after a restart, and the setup asks for exactly the permissions Android needs to let them fire on time.
The alarm repeats up to five times, five minutes apart. After that the reminder stays on screen until the intake window closes. Snooze for fifteen minutes when now isn't the moment.
Send yourself a test reminder, and follow a step-by-step guide to the battery settings for your phone's brand. Huawei and Xiaomi need a hand.
Tell it the pack size and DoseBuddy counts down, then reminds you to buy the next box before the last pill goes.
Your medication list, schedules and intake history are kept on the device, with no account and no sign-up. Medication and profile names are never sent to analytics or advertisers, and your data is never sold.
Two things do leave the phone, and neither is medical: crash and usage statistics through Google Firebase, and a licence check with RevenueCat that tells the app whether Premium is active. Both carry a technical identifier for the installation, not for you. The detail is in the privacy policy.
Yes. The free version covers one profile and up to three medications, with the complete reminder engine. Nothing about the reminding is held back.
Premium is a one-time purchase, not a subscription: it lifts the medication limit and adds interval schedules such as “every eight hours”. The current price is on the Google Play listing.
A pill box organises the week, but it cannot remind anyone. Dispensers with a built-in alarm can, except they have to be bought and then carried around.
DoseBuddy does the same job on the phone they already own: a full-screen alarm that repeats, and a history you can look back at.
Android 8.0 (Oreo) and newer. There's no iPhone version. Reminder delivery is tested hardest on Samsung and Huawei, the brands most aggressive about shutting down background apps.
No. The schedule, the reminders and the history all work offline, with no account and no sign-up. A connection is only needed to install the app or to buy Premium.
Yes. The reminder takes over the whole screen and rings on the alarm channel, like an alarm clock, so silent mode doesn't mute it.
Android asks for a couple of permissions the first time (exact alarms and full-screen notifications), and the setup walks through them one at a time.
DoseBuddy comes back in fifteen minutes and repeats twice more. Nothing is ever silently marked as taken, and Later stays available until the intake window closes.
Yes. Plenty of people run DoseBuddy on their own phone as a personal reminder, or set up a parent's phone and hand it back.
For now the schedule lives on whichever phone it was set up on. Syncing two phones is what we're building next.
No. There are no ads in DoseBuddy today, and there will never be one on a reminder, an alarm or the elder-mode screen.
It doesn't give medical advice, suggest doses, or check whether two medicines interact. It's a reminder organizer. The medical questions belong with a doctor or a pharmacist.
Free on Google Play. No account, no sign-up. The first medicine is added before the kettle boils.
