Apple alarms are known, to put it simply, for being horribly inconsistent. As an admittedly deep sleeper, I find them almost impossible to wake up to on a day-to-day basis, no matter what sound I choose, the volume, or how many alarms I set. And recently, after the new iOS update, half of my alarms have apparently stopped working.
Now, I’ve heard many people complain about this, and an equal number say they’re delusional, but I have seen my alarm go off without making a sound. This problem isn’t just inconvenient but has actually hindered my day-to-day life as I struggle to wake up in time for school and other commitments. Luckily for me, six months ago, I decided to be done with Apple alarms altogether and switched to a new alarm app: Alarmy.
At first, I thought it was stupid to download a separate app just for alarms, since I was sure I would have the same problem as with Apple alarms and my never-ending struggle to wake up in the morning, as all alarm sounds eventually become part of my dreams. However, after six months of using Alarmy, I can honestly say that I’ve never slept through one of their alarms.
What’s different about Alarmy from other apps is its ability to customize your wake-up routine. Apart from its over 100 unique alarm sounds, ranging from purge alarms to classical music, it offers challenges.
If you set an optional mission for yourself on your alarm, you cannot turn off the alarm or lower the volume until you complete it. The missions are divided into two categories: waking up your brain or waking up your body.
The mental missions include math problems with customizable difficulty, starting with simple addition, such as 3+4, and extending to complex multi-step problems that require multiplying three-digit numbers. Now, as someone who definitely can’t think that coherently in the morning, I usually keep it on a fairly easy level, adding two two-digit numbers, which often proves challenging enough to do while half asleep. You can also choose the number of math problems you have to successfully complete before the alarm turns off. Don’t worry, though, the alarm sound doesn’t ring while you’re doing the math.
Other mental missions include typing challenges with varying sentence lengths and difficulty, and a memory game where you have to find previously highlighted color tiles, similar to the Simon game. My personal favorite of the mental missions is the math, as I feel like it forces me to really think to get the answer right, and it isn’t something I can do entirely on autopilot. When it starts getting too easy, you can up the difficulty of the problems.
The physical missions are also really effective, with a number of challenges that get you up and out of your bed to turn the alarm off. One of these is a photo challenge where you take a photo that you then have to retake in the morning; it could be of your bathroom sink, your nightstand, or really anything. Another is the shaking feature, which requires you to shake your phone a certain number of times. The most recent addition to these challenges, and my favorite, is the household item hunt using their new AI system.
The household item hunt gives you a random common household object that you have to scan in order to turn off your alarm, and it offers 71 objects that you can choose whether or not to include in the list of options.
It is also worth noting that there is a premium version of the app that offers more missions, “wake-up” checks, and sleep insights that is available for around $5 a month, but I find that the app functions well without premium, and the app doesn’t pester you too much about purchasing the upgrade.
As effective as the missions are, what really wakes me up is the fear of my parents’ wrath if I don’t turn it off quickly, as the blaring, nonstop alarm goes off, and nothing wakes me up as fast as that. Without being able to turn down the volume, it’s truly a race in the morning to see how fast I can turn it off, and recently I’ve even stopped using the missions because using them so much over the past six months has made me wake up to the first ring.
After years of setting alarms every five minutes in a futile attempt to wake up, I have finally found a system that works and one that honestly scares me enough to get me out of bed each morning. With Apple’s alarm systems increasingly failing, Alarmy is the perfect solution.
