Background or timed activity

I remember this was a hard thing to find back when I wrote a similar app for windows mobile years ago. What I want is an app that users can configure how often it should pop up and run for them to interact with it. I know the focus of this toolset is games but I assume something like this can be possible, yet I’m not seeing anything like it in the docs/searching forums etc.

[EDIT] Reading more online I see that iOS is harder to make this kind of thing happen but that local notification seems to be the way to go. That being said, I can’t find any talk of local notification in cocos2d. Is it possible?

What you’re talking about is a feature offered by iOS SDK. You should search in iOS forums.
Cocos2d is just a gaming framework.