How do I schedule a notification a year ahead?

Schedule a repeating yearly notification where the platform supports it, and re-arm the next occurrence when the app opens as a fallback. iOS caps pending local notifications at 64, so with three tiers per person you can only pre-schedule around twenty people — schedule a rolling window of the nearest birthdays and top it up on launch rather than trying to queue everyone.

Should I ask for contacts permission on first launch?

No. Asking for the address book before the user has seen anything is the fastest way to a denied permission you can never re-request. Let them add two people by hand, then offer the import from settings once they have a reason to want it.

How to Build a Birthday Reminder App with AI (2026)

What a birthday reminder app needs

People with birthdays, optional birth year, and relationship
Tiered reminders: 7 days, 1 day, and morning-of
Gift ideas saved per person, marked when given
Year view showing who is coming up each month
Import from contacts, with review before adding

The screens

Screen	What it does
Upcoming	Next birthdays with days remaining and age turning
Year View	All twelve months with people grouped under each
Person Detail	Date, age, gift ideas, and past gifts given
Add Person	Name, date, optional year, relationship, reminder tiers
Settings	Default reminder tiers, notification time, contacts import

The data model

Person: name, birthMonth, birthDay, birthYear (optional), relationship, photoUri, notes
GiftIdea: personId, title, priceEstimate, url, status (idea | bought | given), givenAt
ReminderRule: personId, daysBefore, enabled
Settings: defaultDaysBefore (array), notificationHour

The build prompt (copy this)

Paste this into ShipNative and it becomes a working React Native app with these screens, navigable in a live preview, in about two minutes:

“A birthday reminder app. People have a name, a birth month and day, an optional birth year, and a relationship. Because the year is optional, the app must handle a person with no age gracefully everywhere rather than showing a nonsense number — this is the detail that breaks most naive implementations. Reminders are tiered per person: a default of seven days before, one day before, and the morning of, each toggleable, all scheduled as local notifications at a time the user chooses in settings and rescheduled for the following year automatically once a birthday passes. Upcoming lists the next birthdays with days remaining and the age they are turning when the year is known. Year View shows all twelve months with people grouped under each so the user can see a heavy month coming. Person detail holds gift ideas with an estimated price, an optional link, and a status of idea, bought, or given, with given gifts kept as a history so the same present is not repeated. Contacts import reads birthdays from the address book and shows them in a review list where the user picks which to add rather than adding all of them. Works offline. Screens: Upcoming, Year View, Person Detail, Add Person, Settings.”

Then iterate with small, screen-specific prompts (“make the primary button bigger”, “add an empty state”), preview on your own phone, and export the full Expo project whenever you want. The full method: how to build an app with AI.

How it makes money

A one-time unlock ($3-5) past roughly fifteen people. This is a utility people use a handful of times a year, so a subscription is a hard sell and churn would be brutal — price it as a small purchase and expect modest, steady revenue rather than a growth curve.

Implementation and the revenue math for every model: how to make money from an app. When you’re ready to ship: App Store and Google Play publishing guides.

Build it now

The prompt above is free to run at shipnative.dev — working birthday reminder app on your phone today, full code export, no credit card.

How to Build a Birthday Reminder App with AI