Overview
WakeSharp is an alarm clock app for heavy sleepers who barely register a standard phone alarm. Instead of a swipe, each alarm demands a mission: a quick arithmetic round, a photo of a spot chosen the night before, real steps, or an answer spoken out loud. It ships as a native app for iPhone and Android.
Key Features
- Fifteen wake-up missions, grouped by type. Brain options include Mind Games, Memory Match, Sequence Recall, Colour Clash and Type It Out. Camera options include Photo Proof, Scan an Object, Fetch, Face Check and Fruit Slash. Movement covers Walk It Off and First Light, while voice missions such as Serial Sevens and Name Five ask for an answer out loud. A single alarm can chain several missions in a chosen order, with a fallback if one cannot run that morning, and Surprise Me varies the task daily.
- An alarm reliability check that gives a verdict. Settings reads the conditions that genuinely stop alarms, including permissions, alarm volume, notification settings, lock screen takeover and battery restrictions, then states in one line whether the alarm will ring, may not, or cannot. Where the platform will not share an answer, the app says so instead of showing a green tick.
- Calendar alarms that follow the schedule. A rule can be set to ring 90 minutes before the first meeting. The calendar is read on the device, read-only, checked again overnight, and the alarm shifts when the meeting shifts.
- Shift rotations, profiles and a Today view. Rotas that are not weekly, such as two days on and two nights, get a preview calendar plus the option to skip a single date. Profiles swap a whole alarm set for work, vacation or on-call weeks.
- Sharpness Score, streaks and the morning warm-up. Three rotating games drawn from Mind Games, Memory Match, Sequence Recall, Word Dash and Reaction Tap produce a score out of 100, measured against the person's own rolling baseline rather than strangers. A streak, trend line, freeze tokens and milestones at 7, 30, 100 and 365 days track the pattern.
- Native apps, watch support and privacy by default. SwiftUI on iOS and Kotlin with Compose on Android, requiring iOS 26 or Android 8.0 or later, with watch apps on watchOS 26 and Wear OS 3 that tap the wearer awake before the room hears anything. Camera and calendar processing stays on the phone, no account is needed, sign-in with Apple or Google exists only for backup, and the app carries no ads.
Use Cases
Someone on a rotating shift pattern who never wakes to the same alarm twice can build the rotation once, skip a date when plans change, and let the pre-bed reminder surface the worst reliability finding while there is still time to fix it. A commuter with a 9am stand-up can tie the alarm to the calendar so it moves earlier when the meeting does, then clear a photo mission on the way to the kettle. Heavy sleepers who have tried snooze-proof alarms before get a menu of mission types rather than mandatory arithmetic every single morning.
What sets WakeSharp apart is the honesty. It scores sharpness against the person's own baseline, says plainly when an alarm might not ring, and keeps calendar and camera work on the device.
