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Why alarms wake you badly, why Android alarms fail, and what we learn building one that does not. Written for people who searched for a real answer.
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Harsh alarms trigger a startle response and deepen sleep inertia. On Android they also miss, for six specific and fixable reasons. An honest comparison of every way to wake up to something other than a beep, including where our own app is the wrong answer.
All of it is possible on Android, most of it needs a paid account, and every option hands your morning to the network. What each setup does when the connection is bad at 6 am, taken from the developers' own documentation.
Whether a show suits an alarm depends on what time its episode lands, not what it is about. Publication times and episode lengths measured from 30 publishers' own feeds, including the two well-known shows that are actually published in the late afternoon.
Two apps, one show, two different newest episodes. We compared 129,997 episodes against their publishers' own feeds to find out how far apart a directory and a feed drift, and which shows it happens to.