Mission alarm
Wakeus
An alarm that keeps ringing until you are actually up.
Wakeus replaces the snooze button with a mission. The alarm rings until you finish something real — find an object, solve a problem, do the pushups — and only then does it stop.
- Status
- Coming soon to iOS and Android
- Platform
- iOS and Android
- Pricing
- Planned: 3-day free trial, then $9.99/month or $29.99/year
- Voice
- “The morning starts when you do.”
The problem
A normal alarm asks for one tap, and one tap is exactly what a half-asleep person can manage without waking up. Snooze is not a failure of discipline; it is the design working as intended. The person who set a 6:30 alarm the night before and the person who silences it at 6:30 are negotiating, and the alarm has handed all the leverage to the one still in bed.
What we built
We moved the off switch out of reach. When Wakeus rings it opens straight into a mission, and the sound keeps looping until the mission is done — there is no snooze and no dismiss. Missions range from quick maths to photo tasks and pushups, and the checking happens on the phone itself. Because the alarm is still ringing while the phone decides, every check is built to coach rather than block: nobody who has genuinely got up is ever left stuck.
Inside the product
The decisions that mattered.
Eight missions
Object Hunt, Math, Pushups, Sky Photo, Make Your Bed, Affirmation, Bible Verse, or a random pick each morning — set per alarm.
Checked on the device
Photo missions are recognised with Apple Vision on iOS and ML Kit on Android, and pushups are counted from live body pose. No photo leaves the phone to prove you are awake.
Coaches, never traps
A rejected photo comes back with a hint, not a scolding. After three genuine attempts, or a minute of trying, the mission lets you through — and records that the morning was not verified.
Rings like a real alarm
On iOS it uses AlarmKit so the alarm sounds full screen through Silent and Focus; on Android it runs as a foreground alarm service.
No escape hatch
One screen owns the sound from the first ring to the finished mission. There is no snooze, and on Android the back button does nothing while it rings.
A commitment, signed
Onboarding ends with you signing your name to the wake-up you chose. Quiz answers stay on the device.
What it taught the studio
Lessons that transfer.
Building our own products is how we develop the judgement we bring to everyone else’s.
Fail open when the stakes are human
A false rejection at 5am is the worst thing this app can do to someone who did get up. So every recognizer can only make a mission easier, never impossible. Any system that can block a person on a machine's judgement needs the same ladder: coach first, then let them through, then record that it did.
Verified and passed are different facts
Wakeus records whether a morning was earned or granted, and never shows the difference as a failure. Keeping those two apart is what lets the product stay kind in the moment and honest in the numbers afterwards.
Put the tunable part where it is cheap to change
The camera measures brightness and blur natively, but what counts as “too dark” is decided in the app bundle, so thresholds can be retuned without a native rebuild. Splitting measuring from judging is a pattern we reach for in client systems too.
Start a conversation
Tell us what you're building.
We read every message. If we're not the right fit, we'll say so — and point you somewhere better if we can.
Contact the dock
One address, read by the people who would do the work. No intake form, no calendar link — just an email.
tphamdn@gmail.com