A mission alarm is the headline, but most of AlarmK is the unglamorous part: getting the alarm to actually fire, on the days you actually want it.
AlarmK is a mission alarm app for iPhone. It can require a QR scan, a math problem, a memory sequence, typing, a shake, squats, a walk or a photo before an alarm will stop.
Free on the App Store. No in-app purchases, no ads, no account. Requires iOS 26 or later.
Free on the App Store · Requires iOS 26 or later
A mission is what you have to do before the alarm will stop. It blocks the eyes-closed dismiss and asks for something you can only do awake. There are eight, each with an Easy · Normal · Hard difficulty, and every alarm can have its own.
Scan a code you have put somewhere far from the bed. The most reliable of the eight.
Solve the problem you are given.
Repeat the sequence of lit tiles. Get it wrong and it simply shows a new sequence; there is no penalty.
Type the sentence shown. Case and repeated spaces are ignored.
Shake the phone a set number of times.
Do a set number of squats. It detects the pause at the bottom, so half-sitting does not count.
Take a set number of steps. Only steps after the mission starts are counted.
Take one photo and you are done. The image is never stored.
You can chain up to five missions on one alarm, done in the numbered order, with the alarm ringing until the last is finished. Try it out runs any mission as practice — nothing rings and nothing is recorded — and Emergency stop offers a backup mission in a different sense for the mornings when the camera is broken or the code is out of reach. More on missions.
AlarmK is built on AlarmKit, the system alarm API Apple introduced in iOS 26. With the system alarm permission allowed, alarms ring through the same path as Apple's Clock app: through Silent mode and through Focus, full screen on the Lock Screen. Deny it and the alarm falls back to a notification, which the ringer switch can mute — so the app labels those alarms Scheduled via notifications rather than letting the difference go unnoticed.
An alarm keeps repeating until you turn it off; it is not a notification that chimes once. Repeats run for the re-ring duration in Settings › Behavior, 15 minutes by default. Ringing escalation raises the app's own audio after about 40 seconds of no response, and gentle wake eases the first 30 seconds in. The Dynamic Island and the Lock Screen Live Activity carry the countdown, the ringing state, then mission progress. How AlarmKit works.
For a first day at work, a flight, an interview. It puts eight checks on one screen — system alarm permission, notification permission, battery and charging, Silent mode, Focus mode, whether a QR code is registered, Apple Watch pairing, and a Clock app backup alarm — and pre-alerts you at 9pm the night before, then 30 and 10 minutes out. Anything it cannot verify is never counted as a pass, and it is never left in the denominator either. Critical Mode alarms always ring, holiday or not, and it costs nothing extra.
Three repeat modes, because not everyone works Monday to Friday:
Skip public holidays applies to weekday alarms. The Korean statutory holiday table, including substitute holidays through 2028, ships inside the app, so no network call is made to check. It does not apply to shift or dated alarms.
Wake check rings once more 5 to 30 minutes after you finish the mission, for the mornings when finishing a mission and staying up are two different things. It is off by default.
Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets show the next alarm and a countdown, with three Lock Screen accessory sizes. Siri and Shortcuts expose four actions you can run without opening the app: set an alarm, ask about the next one, start a nap or quick alarm, and skip the next occurrence.
iPhone alarms mirror to Apple Watch under the system's own rules and the Live Activity appears in the Watch Smart Stack. AlarmKit does not support watchOS yet, so there is no standalone Watch alarm and the mission has to be finished on the iPhone.
The Report tab logs when the alarm fired and when the mission started and finished, and turns that into a Wake Score with a seven-day trend, that morning's timeline, your snooze count and how late you were against the scheduled time. The Coach tab adds this week's average, success rate and streak with short insights drawn from your own records. All of it is processed on your device; none of it is sent to our servers.
AlarmK has no server account and nothing to sign up for. Alarms, missions and wake statistics are stored locally, and data leaves the device only through Apple's own systems: iCloud backup, iCloud sync to your private container, and Apple's App Store diagnostics. Photo mission images are evaluated in memory and discarded immediately — never stored or transmitted.
The app bundles no advertising, analytics, tracking or social SDK; every third-party framework in it is an Apple system framework. While an alarm is ringing there are no ads, no subscription prompts and no rating requests. Read the privacy policy.
An alarm is an aid, not a certainty. AlarmK is built to reduce the situations where an alarm cannot ring, but it cannot prevent physical failures: a powered-off phone, a drained battery, a denied permission. No alarm app can. For anything that really matters, set a backup alarm in the system Clock app too.
Written for AlarmK 1.3.0. Last updated 1 September 2026.