In Search of the Best Alarm App
Overview of alternatives to the native iOS alarm
This winter, I decided to experiment with several alarm apps outside of the native iOS Clock. I always liked the native iOS app that consists of a clock, alarm, stopwatch, timer, and bedtime. I decided to test other apps in an attempt to see if there is a magical app somewhere out there that makes you effortlessly wake up very early in the morning regardless of how dark it is outside. In short, I had a Fear of Missing Out on the miracle solution!
First, I searched the Apple store to see the most reviewed alarm applications. Then, I searched the web to see if people recommended trying a particular alarm app. I shortlisted the following four candidates: Dawn Chorus, Sleep Cycle, Alarm Clock, Wake Alarm Clock. I tested only free iOS apps, since paying for something that you already have for free, in your $700 phone, seemed too much for me. Here is a short review of each of these apps.
Dawn Chorus
The app lets you choose up to five birds that will form a chorus to wake you up in the morning. The creators of the app, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and its design lab the Studio, wanted to make a useful everyday app and utilize a rich museum collection of bird song clips.
The app has beautiful bird illustrations and photos, and lets you play bird songs. For someone who is really into studying birds, that might be a great alternative to the native iOS alarm. For the 99 percent of users who want a functional app with the main goal of waking up early in the morning, the app doesn’t achieves the purpose. Maybe I chose the wrong birds, but my five-bird chorus didn’t wake me up.
It’s definitely an interesting idea. In fact, when I was living in Cambridge, MA, I remember being woken up by birds in the morning and it worked. Dawn Chorus doesn’t achieve the same effect for me.
Sleep Cycle
This beautifully and simply designed app claims to wake you up in the lightest phase of sleep, which is the natural way of waking up rested. The app has close to 70k reviews and an overall 5 star ranking in the Apple Store. This is the highest rated alarm app in the Apple Store.
I like the design of the app, its smart prompts, and the overall idea of an app waking you up during the optimal phase of sleep. Unfortunately, this app’s cons outweigh its pros for me. You have to keep the phone very close to your bed in a plugged-in state. That’s one of the major usage pain points for me. I don’t want to always remember to plug in my phone, position it in a very specific way, and start the app every single night. This is just something I don’t want to spend time thinking about before I go to bed. Additionally, the app doesn’t let you set a recurrent weekday alarm schedule and there is no feature to set up multiple alarms. Basically, the app requires a lot of unnecessary maintenance.
Alarm Clock
Surprisingly, this alarm has 16.5K reviews and a 4.5 star ranking in the Apple store. I think it’s inspired by table top clocks that were popular in the 1990s. I would stipulate it was designed by someone who is nostalgic about these old digital alarm boxes with green LCD digits. The main reason why I will never use this app is that it runs ads. I doubt any users out there like seeing ads every night before going to bed. The ads do disappear after about a minute, but who spends more than a minute on an alarm app every day?
Wake Alarm Clock
This app is pretty! The description of the app in the App Store says it’s “the most beautiful and intuitive alarm for iPhone & iPad.” The interactions used in the design of this app are not so common though in the alarm app world: you can either slap and flip it, shake it, or swipe to turn it off in the morning. So, unless you watch a short tutorial on how to use this app, I wouldn’t call it intuitive.
Overall, I’m against user guides, even tiny ones, that accompany an app. I think a mobile app should be designed intuitively enough that it doesn’t need a guide. In the case of the Wake Alarm, the guide is the first thing that comes up after you launch the app, and unless you watch it, you might not be able to figure out quickly how to use this alarm app.
Also, the Wake Alarm Clock app has to stay open and your phone needs to be plugged in for the app not to drain your battery overnight. In fact, the very first time I used it — when my phone was at about 25% — the battery died in the middle of the night and the alarm didn’t ring.
What I learned
- If you search the App Store for alarm apps, you will realize there are no viral ones out there. The most popular alarm app, measured by the number of reviews in the App Store, has about 70K reviews. In comparison, the CNN news app has over 195K reviews. I don’t have enough data to project the number of users of alarm apps other than the native iOS Clock app, but it looks like most cell phone users don’t bother getting a separate alarm app.
- If you are looking for a good alarm app, the native iOS Clock app is as good as it gets. It doesn’t claim that you will wake up rested, but it does succeed at its main goal — to wake you up.
- Perhaps the solution to being able to effortlessly wake up early in the morning is not a fancy alarm app, but something else? Have you looked for alternatives to native iOS or Android clock/alarm apps? I wonder if your experience is different or if there are effective alarm apps that I have not discovered yet. Let me know in the comments.
