From the day I got a smartphone, it was obvious to me that the standalone alarm clock was obsolete. Nevertheless, in the ensuing 10 years, I have continued to search for the perfect alarm clock app (Android). I still haven't found one. Alarm Clock Plus was close, until it quit being maintained in 2014. I have switched to Alarm Clock Xtreme, which is good, but not great.
What has been on my mind recently, though, is that even a perfect clock app did appear, I still wouldn't be satisfied. I want a Night Suite app. The alarm clock would anchor the night suite, but there is a lot of important, complementary functionality that I want to be fully integrated with my alarm clock.
In my view, a compelling night suite would integrate an excellent Alarm Clock with the following key functions: Do Not Disturb with Whitelist, Night Clock with super-dimming, low power warning and super-reliability.
Do Not Disturb with Whitelist
This is pretty basic, and there are good apps for it, but I want it to be integrated. If my family members need to get hold of me in the middle of a night, I want Do Not Disturb to be overridden. Not if they send me a text, mind you, but if they call my phone at 2:00am, I do want it to ring.Bonus feature: option for whitelist or non-whitelist members to receive an auto-response when they text during Do Not Disturb hours. Customizable, here is the default: "John Doe is in Do Not Disturb mode. If this is an emergency, you can try calling to bypass Do Not Disturb mode".
Night Clock
This one is stupidly simple, but shockingly hard to find. I want a very, very dim bedside clock. Similar to an LED alarm clock--bright enough to see, dim enough not to act like a light source and cast light on my sleeping eyeballs. Currently I use a combination of an app that dims but not enough, and a filter that imposes a semi-transparent black overlay to further dim the phone.
This should be matched with sunrise functionality, that decreases the dimming toward dawn. This would need to be flexible, to handle varying degrees of room shading. This could be handled by a percentage function for Dawn Adjustment.
Low Power Warning
If power goes out during the night, and my phone is in danger of running out of battery before the alarm goes off, I would want to be woken up. Or, as is more often the case, when I don't plug it in successfully.
I think the basic functionality here would be to sound an alarm if the margin of error for power dips below a certain configurable level. Default would be 1 hour.
Super-Reliability
I am not nearly technical enough to know how to achieve this, but a world-class alarm clock, of any kind, needs to be super-reliable. So anything that could be done to ensure an alarm that is less than 10 hours away does indeed go off would be critical. The thing that comes to mind for me is that I think alarm apps can either have system alarms, or their own alarms. I believe I have experienced alarm app crashes where the app didn't re-start. Maybe one way to deal with this is for the alarm app to have its own alarm, but also set a system alarm for 2 minutes after its own alarm. When its own alarm triggers, it would shut off the system alarm. Thus, if for some reason the app alarm didn't trigger, the system alarm 2 minutes later would be the backstop.
Suite Functions
Single-push widget to go into Night Mode, as well as options for scheduled times for Night Mode. Scheduling functionality would include "X hours before alarm", where default is X=8.
Alarm Notification Icon
The typical Android alarm clock app seems to put an alarm icon in the Notification bar if one is set within the next 24 hours. As a user of pre-set and recurring alarms, I don't find this very useful. Most of the time it tells me what I already know. In the rare event I forgot to set an alarm, I don't want to rely on noticing the usual icon is not present; I want a positive notification when there is no alarm set, within X hours of my standard morning. Default X=8.
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