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Notes on waking up
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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Why your alarm clock ruins your morning, and what to do about it
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.
21 August 2026, 15 min read
Waking up to Spotify, YouTube Music or Apple Podcasts
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.
21 August 2026, 9 min read
Podcasts that work as an alarm
Whether a show suits an alarm depends mostly on what time its episode lands. Publication times and episode lengths measured from 30 publishers' own feeds, and how to check any show yourself in ten seconds.
Updated 14 October 2026, 6 min read
Podcast apps disagree about which episode is the latest
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.
21 August 2026, 7 min read
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