Habit reminders in Telegram: Done, Later, Not today
Complevia has two surfaces — an Android app and a Telegram companion — running on one set of habits. This page explains what that actually buys you, what the setting in the middle does, and where the seams are.
The problem with a habit reminder on a phone
A phone notification has to survive a queue. It arrives alongside a delivery update, two group chats and a game asking you to come back, it gets swiped in the same gesture as everything else, and once swiped it is gone. Habit apps respond by adding badges and streak pressure, which is a way of making you feel worse rather than a way of making the reminder land.
A message in a chat you already read behaves differently. It sits in a thread with a name on it. It is unread until you deal with it. And answering it does not require finding, opening and navigating an app you installed three weeks ago.
What the Telegram side does
- The same habits. Not a separate to-do list that happens to live in a chat — the same actions, the same time windows, the same completion history as the Android app.
- Reminders as messages. A prompt arrives in the chat when the action's window opens, and you answer it there: Done, Later, or Not today. The answer is recorded against the same occurrence the phone would have recorded.
- No install. The Mini App runs inside Telegram. There is no APK, no store, no sideload permission and no 5 MB download — which matters, because the Android build is in closed testing and the honest install path for it is longer than most people will accept from a stranger.
Where the reminder arrives is a setting, and it has a failsafe
Running two surfaces creates an obvious problem: you do not want to be told twice. Complevia makes that a choice with three values.
- Telegram — the bot sends; the phone schedules its alarms but stays quiet.
- Device — the phone sends; the bot says nothing.
- Both — the default, and deliberately so: it is what every install did before the choice existed, so upgrading has never silently changed anyone's reminders.
The interesting part is the failsafe. If you pick Telegram and the link later breaks — you disconnect, the token is revoked, you reinstall, you reset the app's data — a naive implementation leaves you with a phone that has been told to stay quiet and a bot that is no longer listening. Silence on both surfaces, caused by a setting that made sense when you made it, and experienced as "the app stopped reminding me".
So the phone honours a preference for Telegram only while there is a Telegram to honour it. The moment the account is unlinked, the device starts posting reminders again on its own, without you having to notice and go change a setting you had forgotten about.
The reason that logic lives on the phone rather than the server is worth stating plainly: a server cannot decide whether a phone rings. It may be offline, out of signal, or in a drawer — but it still holds its own alarms and will fire them. So the choice reaches the device as an instruction the device applies itself.
What it does not do
- It is not required. The Android app works completely without it, and is off from Telegram until you connect it yourself.
- Connecting it does send data. Once linked, your habit titles, schedules and completion events go to the Complevia server so both surfaces agree. Before that, they do not. The privacy policy says which is which without hedging.
- The window rule is the same on both surfaces, including its limit: a window runs inside one day, so an overnight routine needs two actions rather than one.
Try it before you install anything
The Mini App is the cheapest possible way to find out whether this style of reminder suits you. It costs one tap and no permissions, and if the answer is no, you have not sideloaded anything.