Wakeling - An alarm you cannot snooze

Inspiration

I hit snooze again and again, and every alarm built to stop that does it by being as loud and punishing as possible, which wakes everyone else in the house too. I wanted an alarm that is impossible to snooze but kind to wake up to, and a reason to actually look forward to getting up.

What it does

Wakeling is an alarm with no snooze button. It stops when you finish a short task that gets you on your feet:

• The walk: walk for one to three minutes (you choose). It counts real steps and can tell walking from shaking the phone.
• Squats: twelve squats, counted by the front camera.
• Target Scan: show the camera something you can't keep by the bed, like the kettle.

While you lie still the alarm rings at full volume. The moment you are up and moving, it goes quiet, and it comes back if you stop. The fastest way to end it is the thing you meant to do anyway, and it wakes you, not the whole house.

The reason to do it again tomorrow is the pet. Four pets live in a room behind the clock. Every morning you get up, your pet brings you a gift worth love, the app's only currency. Love can't be bought. It is earned only by getting out of bed, and it buys rooms (the Moon, Sydney, Venice, Paris, Mars and more), mats, bowls, clocks and more pets. There are streaks, achievements and five Home and Lock Screen widgets, and the whole app is in English and Japanese.

How it makes money

Two ways, both through RevenueCat:

• Wakeling Pro: $9.99 a year or $24.99 lifetime, with a 14-day free trial that needs no card and starts automatically, so every user experiences Pro before being asked to pay. Pro adds the camera missions, dog and cat alarm sounds, up to ten alarms, double love, the Pro pets and rooms, and three of the five widgets.
• The room shop: 17 items sold one at a time as non-consumables: rooms (Mars, the Park, the Seaside), furniture, mats, bowls and a pet (Maple the tabby), from $1.49 to $4.99. Tap any item and it appears in your room with your pet straight away; then keep it by earning it with love, buying it outright, or getting it with Pro. Prices, purchases and restores all run through RevenueCat.

Love itself is never for sale, so the shop is a shortcut, never a paywall. The alarm, the walk and the volume that fades as you get up stay free forever.

How we built it

React Native and Expo with TypeScript, plus native Swift modules. Alarms use Apple's AlarmKit with a notification chain behind it, so they ring from a cold start and through the silent switch. The walk uses Core Motion (step counting plus a cadence and rotation check to reject shaking). Squats use Apple's Vision body-pose on-device, and Target Scan uses on-device image classification: camera frames are never stored or uploaded. Widgets are WidgetKit. Purchases and entitlements run on RevenueCat with StoreKit 2.

Challenges we ran into

• App Review: several rounds under guideline 2.1 before approval. The fix made the app better: the alarm now survives a force-quit and no longer interrupts podcasts.
• Shaking vs walking: telling a real walk from someone shaking the phone in bed, without ever trapping a real walker with an alarm ringing. It now refuses only sustained shaking, and after a minute of refused steps it stops checking.
• Japanese: a full localisation, including line-breaking speech bubbles by hand and a Japanese font for the app and the widgets.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

All ratings so far are 5 stars. The alarm really does go quiet the moment you get up, and it has never needed a snooze button.

What we learned

Rewarding people works better than punishing them. The pet and the love it pays out do more to get people up than a louder alarm.

What's next for Wakeling

Korean and Chinese, Android, more rooms and pets, and a gentle nudge at the end of the trial.

Built With

• alarmkit
• expo.io
• ios
• react-native
• revenuecat
• storekit
• swift
• typescript
• vision
• widgetkit