How escalation works

Escalation is Nudje’s signature mechanic: if you repeatedly ignore or reject a reminder, the next one sounds and reads a little firmer — up to a cap you choose. It’s off by default, opt-in per reminder, and quiet hours always win. In plain terms: Nudje is the reminder app that keeps reminding you — it nags you (nicely) until you do it, and never past the limits you set.

The rules, exactly

• Every consecutive ignore or reject raises the escalation level by one.
• Complete resets the level to zero immediately.
• Snooze is neutral — you engaged with the reminder, so it neither raises nor resets the level.
• The level never exceeds the maximum you set (1–3).
• Escalation changes the next scheduled reminder — it does not re-ring the current one over and over.

At level 1 the tone is gentle. At level 2 the sound is fuller and the wording firmer (“Water time — you’ve been skipping”). At level 3 you get the most insistent tone in your chosen sound set (“Seriously — drink some water now”).

The guarantees

Escalation is designed to never become the thing you hate:

1. Quiet hours always win. Inside quiet hours (22:00–07:00 by default, adjustable), no reminder ever escalates — the gentle tone is used no matter what the level is. There is no way to configure an un-silenceable reminder in Nudje.
2. Opt-in, per reminder. A new reminder never escalates unless you switch it on.
3. Capped. You choose the ceiling (1–3). Nudje never goes past it.
4. A circuit-breaker, not a nag. If you ignore a maxed-out reminder many times in a row, Nudje stops pushing and instead asks whether you’d like to change its time, ease off, or pause it. A reminder that only annoys you is a badly-scheduled reminder — fixing the schedule beats nagging.
5. Medication phrasing stays calm at every level. Pill reminders raise salience, never shame.

Platform differences (the honest part)

• Android computes the escalation level at the exact moment a reminder fires, so escalation ramps in real time.
• iPhone bakes a notification’s sound in when it’s scheduled (an iOS platform rule), so escalation “catches up” when you next open the app or iOS refreshes it in the background. In practice: nudges get firmer when you check back in. Real-time ramping on iPhone arrives with cloud-connected escalation in a future update.