An Alarmy alternative, and what Alarmy still gets right

I started looking for an Alarmy alternative at 6:32 a.m. on a Tuesday, standing in my bathroom with a phone that had just made me photograph the sink. It was now showing me a full-screen ad for a farming game. I was awake, so the alarm had worked. But the first thing my brain did with its new consciousness was hunt for a tiny close button, and I thought there had to be a way to get the first part without the second.

So I went back to my notes. I keep a spreadsheet on my own sleep, and for two weeks it had a column for Alarmy. This is what I found, what I would keep, and what I would swap it for.

What Alarmy gets right

First, why I took it seriously. In my call center years I slept through alarms constantly. I set two alarms, then put the phone on the far side of the room. More than once I woke at noon with the phone back on my pillow and no memory of walking over to get it. My body had learned to turn alarms off without asking me first.

The Alarmy app is built for exactly that version of a person. It is made by Delightroom Co., Ltd., which calls it the "Global #1 Mission Alarm App" and puts 110 million downloads on its own site. That number comes from the company, not an audit, but it tells you a lot of people have tried the idea.

The idea is the mission. Tapping the alarm does not stop it. Finishing a task that needs a working brain does. Delightroom lists eight: math, memory, shake, typing, squat, QR or barcode, step and photo. In the company's words, the point is to "reduce the chance of falling back asleep." It runs on iPhone and iPad, where the App Store listing asks for iOS 17.0 or later, and the company's site also carries a Google Play badge for Android.

It is loud, it is hard to wriggle out of, and it rang reliably for me with the phone locked. I set the photo mission for the bathroom sink. That meant I was out of bed and under a bright light before I could argue with myself, and that part helped.

There is a real reason it helps. The groggy stretch right after waking is called sleep inertia. It means the slow, foggy period when you are technically awake but your thinking is still well below normal. A review by Hilditch and McHill in Nature and Science of Sleep (2019) says most of it fades within about 30 minutes, but full recovery does not appear complete until at least an hour after waking.

The half-asleep hand that taps "off" lives inside that window. A mission makes you push through the worst of it before the alarm lets go. I wrote more about why that works in why a math alarm clock works on a brain that is still half asleep.

Where it started to grate

The ads came first. The App Store listing says plainly that the app "Contains Advertising," and Delightroom sells ad removal as part of Premium, pitched as "ZERO ads." So the free version has ads. What bothered me was when I saw them. On several mornings one appeared right after I finished the mission, which is the moment I least want to be negotiating with my phone. I only tested my own phone, and ad placement can change by version, phone and country, so yours may be calmer or worse. Mine annoyed me enough that it got its own column in the spreadsheet.

The second thing is the subscription. Alarmy's help center says the paid plan is a subscription and that "you can subscribe on a monthly or yearly basis." Premium adds ad removal and extra missions. It also adds an extra-loud effect that kicks in after 40 seconds with no response, and a feature called Wake Up Check that sets the alarm off again to catch you if you went back to sleep. If I paid for anything, it would be Wake Up Check, because that second ring is the one my old self needed. I would skip the loud boost. Volume stopped working on me years ago, which I explain in why a loud alarm stopped waking me.

Prices are where I got stuck. Apple's listing shows several products, Alarmy Premium Basic at $4.99, Alarmy Premium Standard at $7.49, another Alarmy Premium Standard at $59.99 and Alarmy Pro at $69.99, plus a 7-day free trial. The page does not say which price is monthly and which is yearly. I am not going to guess. If you start the trial, read the renewal price and date on the confirmation screen itself, and set a reminder for the day before it ends. A seven-day trial of an alarm is an odd thing anyway, because you judge an alarm on your bad mornings, and you may not have one that week.

Delightroom says the core features are free, and in my two weeks that held up. Every mission I cared about worked without paying.

So my honest Alarmy review is short. The core idea is strong, and the free version wraps it in friction. If the mission is what you need, you can get one elsewhere with less noise around it.

Do missions actually wake you up better?

I have to be careful here, because the research is thinner than the app store pages suggest. I could not find a peer-reviewed controlled trial that tests whether a dismissal task, like a math problem or a photo, actually reduces oversleeping.

The largest study of Alarmy itself is by Oh, Shin, Kim and Ko in Applied Sciences in 2020. It analyzed 42.9 million in-app usage records from 211,273 US users over five months, and found that people used the alarm differently depending on which task it asked for. That is a finding about how people use the app. It does not tell you whether anyone woke on time, felt better or snoozed less.

The rest of what exists is research on waking and snoozing in general, and it does not all agree with the "never snooze" crowd. Mattingly and colleagues, in Sleep in 2022, looked at 103,169 nights of wearable data from 450 people, and 57% of them snoozed. Snoozers had lighter sleep and a higher resting heart rate, but they did not sleep less than non-snoozers. It was observational, so it cannot say the button caused any of that. Sundelin and colleagues, in the Journal of Sleep Research in 2023, brought habitual snoozers into a lab. After 30 minutes of snoozing they did not do worse on thinking tests, and on some measures they did a little better. It is one small group of people who already liked to snooze, so I would not build a life on it. It does suggest the snooze button is less of a villain than people say. I go through all of it, and what finally worked for me, in how to stop snoozing.

So a mission alarm is a reasonable bet, not a proven fix. It solves one specific problem, which is turning the alarm off without really waking. If that is you, a mission is worth having. If your problem is waking up feeling awful, a mission will not fix it. It will just make sure you are up and still feeling awful.

Feeling awful usually comes down to two things I can count. The first is how much you slept. The National Sleep Foundation panel (Hirshkowitz et al., Sleep Health, 2015) recommends 7 to 9 hours for most adults, and no alarm makes five hours feel like eight. The sleep debt calculator shows how far behind you are this week. The second is where in a sleep cycle the alarm lands, which I come back to below.

If you get enough sleep and still sleep through every alarm you own, or you fall asleep during the day whatever you do, talk to a doctor, and my about page says plainly what I am and am not.

Apps like Alarmy, and the plainer options

These are the options I would look at, starting with the least fuss.

• The clock app already on your phone. It is free, has no ads and needs no account. It has no mission. On its own it failed me for years, but if your trouble is grogginess and not the sleepwalking "off" tap, it may be all you need.
• Sleep as Android. Its wake-up tasks, which it calls CAPTCHAs, include math, shaking the phone, and scanning a QR code or tapping an NFC tag you stick somewhere across the house. It is Android only, and some of it costs money, so check the store listing for what is free before you commit.
• A mission alarm on iPhone. There are several apps like Alarmy for iOS, and the list changes often. Before you trust one with a real morning, set it for two minutes out, close the app, switch the phone to silent and lock it. If it does not ring properly, that is your answer.
• A wearable with a smart alarm. Garmin's Smart Wake, as its Enduro 3 manual describes it, can wake you gently in the 30-minute window before your set time, and the alarm at your chosen time always goes off as well. That backstop matters. A wrist buzz alone is easy for me to sleep through, so I would treat the gentle wake as a bonus and not the plan.
• A wake-up light. Philips says its HF3470/60 lamp brightens gradually over the 30 minutes before your wake time, up to 250 lux. On dark winter mornings that makes the room feel less like the middle of the night. It will not make you get up, so pair it with an alarm across the room.
• A cheap alarm clock on the far side of the room. You get no ads, no updates and no battery settings to fight. The walk does some of what a mission does, though I learned to walk straight back to bed.

I compared more of these, with what each one suits, in my piece on choosing an alarm clock app. Whichever one you try, test three things on a night that does not matter. Does it still ring after you swipe the app closed? Does an ad appear around the moment you turn it off? And what does it cost once any trial ends?

One setting matters for every Android alarm, Alarmy included. Some phones put apps to sleep to save battery, and an alarm app that has been put to sleep can ring late or not at all. If an alarm misbehaves, look at its battery setting before you blame the app.

The free browser alarm on this site

The online alarm clock here is the useful bit of Alarmy with the grating parts left out. It runs in a browser tab, with no account, no app store and no server. You set a time and, if you want, turn on a math problem that has to be solved before it stops. There are no ads and nothing to subscribe to.

It has honest limits, and I would rather you hear them from me than find out at 7 a.m. Close the tab and there is nothing left to ring. The device has to stay awake with the sound on. Phones like to freeze a background tab to save battery, so I would not trust a browser alarm on a phone that locks itself to get me to a flight. It suits a laptop or desktop that stays plugged in and awake, or an afternoon nap when you are near the screen anyway.

I use it two ways. One is naps at my desk, timed with the nap calculator so I wake before the nap turns into a groggy afternoon. The other is a second alarm on the laptop across the room on mornings that really matter. The phone rings first, and if I silence that, the laptop is still going and the math problem stops me from just slapping it quiet. It is also a free way to find out whether a math task gets you out of bed at all, before you pay anyone to find out for you. Those limits are the reason the alarm app I am building exists at all, because a tab cannot promise to ring from a locked phone.

The same test applies here. Set it two minutes out, walk to the bed, and check that you can hear it from the pillow.

Timing the alarm so any of them works

Whatever you pick, the time you set matters as much as the app. Sleep runs in cycles of light sleep, deep sleep and dreaming sleep. Carskadon and Dement, in Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine, put a full cycle at roughly 90 minutes, and yours may be 70 or 110. Waking near the end of a cycle tends to feel easier than being pulled out of deep sleep in the middle of one. That is a rule of thumb, not a guarantee, but my whole spreadsheet is built on it.

So I count backwards. If I need to be up at 6:30 a.m., I allow about 15 minutes to fall asleep and count back in 90 minute cycles. Five cycles puts lights out around 10:45 p.m., and six puts it around 9:15 p.m. The sleep calculator does this arithmetic for you, and I wrote up the reasoning in what time should I go to bed.

Then match the alarm to the problem you actually have.

• If you turn alarms off in your sleep, keep a mission. Alarmy, Sleep as Android and the math problem on the browser alarm all do that.
• If you wake groggy but you do get up, fix the timing and the hours first. A plain alarm is fine.
• If you are short on sleep all week, no app will cover it. Count the debt and plan an earlier night.

Tonight, before bed, pick one alarm and test it two minutes out, exactly the way you will use it: locked phone or open tab, sound on, heard from where you sleep. Then put your wake time into the sleep calculator, set the alarm for 06:30 or whatever yours is, and turn the light off at the bedtime it gives you.