Daily summary, morning and evening — the app that gives the morning rhythm

Monday morning, 6:30 AM. The phone pings on the nightstand. "3 events today — tap for today's schedule." You glance, mumble, start the coffee. Your brain already has three things to hang the day around.

Sunday evening, 9:00 PM. A different ping. "Tomorrow: 3 events. Dentist 9:00 AM, soccer 5:00 PM, meeting 7:30 PM." You nod, take one last look at the calendar, fall asleep without calendar-stress.

This is the daily summary v2 in FamilyBoard. The first version, which has been around for a month or so, was a single morning time and a static text. People liked the idea but griped at the edges: "I don't want the same time on Saturdays", "I want a notification the night before, not the morning of", "Skip weekends entirely". We listened, rebuilt, shipping today.

What changed

Three things you can control independently:

1. Weekday and weekend times are separate. Default 7:00 AM weekday, 9:00 AM weekend. You set your own values in Settings.
2. The evening "tomorrow" notification is its own ping at a separate time. Default 9:00 PM. Shows the next day's events. Good for planning ahead — what to pack, who's driving.
3. Skip-weekend toggle. Free Saturdays and Sundays without a ping from us. Default on, because most people want it that way.

You can mix freely. Just morning. Just evening. Both. Weekdays only. Weekends only. We're not opinionated — you know your rhythm, we set the phone right.

Here's how it works

1. Settings → Notifications → Daily summary. You see four time pickers: weekday morning, weekend morning, weekday evening, weekend evening. Plus a "Skip weekend" toggle that masks the two weekend pickers.

2. Set the times you want. Defaults work for most — 7:00 AM weekday, 9:00 AM weekend, 9:00 PM both evenings. Tweak freely.

3. Tap "Save". Done. We schedule up to 14 local notifications (one per type × 7 days ahead), and the app rotates them automatically as the days roll over.

That's it. No accounts to create, no server-side opt-ins, no email confirmation needed.

Side facts worth knowing

These are local notifications. Meaning: no latency, works offline, we don't send any event titles to APNs ahead of time. The phone schedules the ping itself when you save the settings. Privacy win, performance win, battery win.

The body text is still static in v2. You see "Tap for today's schedule" — not "3 events today". That's deliberate, because local notifications can't count events at fire time. v3 (coming) is dynamic body via server-side pg_cron + APNs, but it requires more infrastructure. For 90% of users v2 is enough: the ping is the trigger, you open the app, the schedule is right there. That's two taps instead of zero, but those taps are free after three days — you do them by muscle memory.

We're not removing v1. If you already have a morning time set, we upgrade it to "weekday morning" automatically and leave the weekend picker and evening picker empty (off). You don't have to do anything if you liked the old behavior.

Questions we get

Where do I set different times for weekdays and weekends? Same Settings → Notifications flow. You see four time pickers instead of one. We always show them — if you have skip-weekend on, the weekend pickers are grayed out but you can flip them on with a tap.

Do I get the notification when I'm on vacation? Yes, it's local — works in whatever time zone the phone is in. If you change time zone on iPhone, the ping follows the new zone automatically (that's the iOS surface, not our code). Set skip-weekend if you want quiet on Saturdays.

What happens if I have 0 events today? The ping comes anyway, but the body text is "Quiet day — nothing scheduled" instead of "Tap for today's schedule". Some users find that a nice confirmation, others find it spam. We're planning a "skip ping if 0 events" toggle in v2.1.

Try it now

Build 42+ on TestFlight. Settings → Notifications → Daily summary. Tweak the times, switch on what you want, save. Tomorrow morning you'll see whether it works — and if not, you adjust in 15 seconds.

This isn't one of the "wow" features we talk about in marketing. But it's the one that gives the app a sense of rhythm — you start every day with a ping, you go to bed with a ping, the day is framed before it begins. We like it.