For most people, the default Android alarm app is all they need, even though it doesn’t offer a lot of features. However, if you’re a heavy sleeper like me, you might want to ditch the default alarm app on your phone for something more advanced.

1

Advanced Wake-Up Features

Most alarm apps present you with two options when an alarm goes off. You can either snooze for a limited period of time or dismiss the alarm outright. AMdroid has more advanced wake-up features that’ll ensure you get out of bed.

For starters, you can set different challenges before you can dismiss your alarm. You can fill in a captcha, solve a math equation, or even dismiss the alarm by touching your phone to an NFC tag. These challenges make sure you get out of bed instead of hitting the snooze button and going back to sleep.

Additionally, the app offers wake-up checks. If enabled, the app sends a reminder after five minutes. If you don’t interact with this notification within the given time frame, your alarm will ring again.

This saves the hassle of creating multiple alarms just to get up in the morning. You can even choose to have a random alarm tune played for the same alarm every morning if you’re like me and subconsciously start ignoring your alarm in the morning.

2

Multiple Alarm Types

There are multiple ways you can set up an Alarm on Android’s stock alarm app, but one of the best things about AMdroid is that you can create multiple alarm types without much hassle.

Want to wake up later on the weekends with more relaxed alarm dismissal settings? Just modify a few settings on your weekend alarm. Have a flight to catch early in the morning? AMdroid’s settings will ensure your alarm goes off on time.

Now, most stock alarm apps allow you to select which days your alarm goes off, but that’s about all the customization you get. With AMdroid, you can fine-tune your alarm settings to match your waking-up requirements.

For example, I only have two alarms set up in the app. My weekday alarm forces me to get out of bed and put my phone on the NFC tag on my desk. Meanwhile, my weekend alarms only require a text captcha with no additional wake-up reminders in case I want to stay in bed.

Like most alarm apps, you can create timers and countdowns. The app also includes a stopwatch in case you want more detailed information and functionality than the stock stopwatch on your phone’s clock.

3

More Customization and Flexibility

The advanced wake-up features and multiple alarm types are controlled with alarm profiles in the app. These profiles allow for a lot of customization and flexibility in how aggressively you want the app to wake you up in the morning. Once your alarm profile is set up, you can use it across multiple alarms.

There are far too many customization options in AMdroid’s alarm profiles to list, but here are some of the most impactful ones.

• Alarm sound settings: covers how the alarm sound kicks in
• Custom snooze intervals
• Custom challenges for dismissing and snoozing your alarms
• Screen brightness settings when the alarm rings
• Pre- and post-alarm settings
• Custom locations to trigger alarms
• Alarm screen appearance
• Calendar and Wear OS integration settings
• Accidental dismissal protection

You can also customize other settings, such as having a Google Assistant schedule kick in when you dismiss your alarm or having AMdroid give you a summary of the news and weather for the day. There is almost too much customization, to the point that I stopped looking at these settings once I got my alarms dialed in.

4

Sleep Tracking

AMdroid also has a built-in sleep-tracking feature, but I wouldn’t count on it to accurately track sleep, especially if you’ve got a smartwatch or smart ring that offers it.

For starters, you have to manually enable sleep tracking. It’s a very basic feature that only counts the time elapsed since you enabled sleep tracking until your alarm goes off or you manually disable it. This data is then used to calculate sleep cycles, so the app wakes you up when you’re in light sleep periods. The app also gives you a night clock when sleep tracking is active, much like the iPhone’s Standby Mode.

However, sleep tracking on phones rarely works simply because, unlike your smartwatch or smart ring, your phone doesn’t have access to sensors that monitor your heart rate or other bodily functionality and can’t automatically detect when you go to sleep. I tried using the feature consistently at first but found manually enabling and disabling it every time a bit of a hassle.

5

It’s More Reliable

Last but not least, I find AMdroid a lot more reliable when it comes to waking myself up. I tend to sleep through alarms, and sometimes, the stock alarm app on Android runs into glitches and issues. There have been instances where my alarms didn’t go off at the right time or the volume was too low to wake me up.

With AMdroid, every alarm goes off on time, and the volume and dismissal settings are all already locked in. This means I can rely on the app to ring alarms exactly how I want them and sleep without worries of missing my alarm in the morning.

The stock Android alarm app is good for basic alarms and has a few other features. However, it is limited in functionality, and you might want more, even if you’re looking for a great iOS alarm app. If you’re missing your alarms often or just need a more aggressive alarm to wake you up, switching to AMdroid can help.