Sol AlarmSol
The alarm you can't cheat.
Most alarms ask you to want to get up. This one makes you prove it: six challenges, three layers of enforcement, and alarms the operating system itself owns.
iPhone · iPad · iOS 26.1+
The problem
You already turned it off. You just don't remember doing it.
Dismissing an alarm takes about a second and needs almost none of your brain. That is the entire failure: the part of you that silences it at 6:02 is not the part that set it at 11pm. Snooze buttons, gentler tones and later alarms all leave that one-second escape hatch open.
Sol closes it. Silence has a price, you set the price yourself, and the alarm keeps coming back until it is paid.
Six ways to earn it
Pick what you have to do before it stops.
Stack as many as you like on a single alarm. They run one at a time, in the order you set.
- 01
Memory Match
Find the pairs. Easy is a 3×3 grid; Brutal is 7×7, three rounds, and three mismatches resets the board. Ships with an Okabe-Ito colour-blind-safe palette and a high-contrast option.
- 02
Math
Fourteen difficulty tiers, from Simple to Master+. Expressions are generated and evaluated properly rather than pulled from a list, so you cannot learn the answers.
- 03
Typing
Type a passage word for word from a curated library, rated by difficulty and tagged by theme. “I finish what I start.” It is harder than it sounds at 6am.
- 04
Step Count
Walk between 10 and 500 steps. The pedometer wants genuine walking: a minimum pace of 20 steps a minute, a 20-second stall timeout, and accelerometer checks that reject shaking the phone.
- 05
Squats
Five to a hundred reps, detected from device motion through descent, bottom-hold and ascent phases, with a depth check, a refractory period between reps, and tumble detection.
- 06
Japanese
Read kana and kanji to dismiss. The hiragana and katakana tiers are built in. The library tier draws its questions from vocabulary you bring: connect WaniKani and import the kanji and words you have already learned, or open an Anki package or Mochi export you already have, which is read on the phone without a single network request. Before a deck is saved, Sol shows how many words it found, which field it read as the word and which as the meaning, and a few sample questions, so you can correct a deck it has read backwards. A firing alarm never goes to the network, whichever tier it uses, and nothing you answer is ever sent back.
On the screen
This app has not shipped yet. Captures land here at release.
Enforcement
Three layers, so one failure isn't the failure.
Optional Protection Mode plays quiet background audio so a dodged alarm returns within seconds and stays loud. A low-battery warning fires if the phone may not survive until the alarm, and only when the alarm is close enough that the warning matters. Every alarm is recorded in a local reliability journal you can read and export.
- 01
The re-fire loop
Dismissing an alarm does not end it. It schedules a five-second countdown that loops until every challenge on that alarm is complete.
- 02
Anti-dodge bursts
If the alarm is dodged rather than answered, notification bursts begin at three-second intervals after a 180-second grace period.
- 03
The fallback chain
A chain of backup alarms is pre-scheduled at +60, +90, +120, +150 and +180 seconds, so a single failure anywhere cannot leave you asleep.
Why it actually rings
The alarm belongs to iOS, not to the app.
Sol is built on AlarmKit. That means the system holds the alarm, so it breaks through Silent mode and Focus, takes over the lock screen, shows in the Dynamic Island and StandBy, and is forwarded to Apple Watch automatically. It fires whether or not the app is running.
Alarm apps that keep themselves alive by playing inaudible background audio are making a bet against the operating system every single night. Sol doesn't need to.
This is why Sol requires iOS 26.1 or later. It is a real cost, and it buys the one thing an alarm clock has to get right.
Sound
Five tones, or one of your own.
Lofi, Star Dust, Morning Joy, Cyber Day and Phoenix, grouped from gentle to energetic. Each has a soft-start ramp you can set to off, 15, 30, 45 or 60 seconds, so it can arrive gradually rather than all at once.
Bring your own
Import any audio file and trim it on a waveform, preview it against the real alarm volume, name it, and lock it in. There is no upload step, because there is nowhere to upload it to.
And the rest of it
Repeat by weekday, per-alarm volume, vibration, snooze length from 5 to 15 minutes with a hard cap on how many times you may use it, and an emergency stop for the mornings where something is genuinely wrong.
Privacy
No analytics, no trackers, no Hex Pro account.
Sol has no Hex Pro account, no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising networks and no tracking identifiers. The step and squat challenges read motion in real time and never write it to disk. The app has no microphone access at all: Protection Mode plays audio, it never records.
Two things use the network. The alarm list may show a banner for another Hex Pro app; fetching it carries nothing that identifies you, and everyone sees the same banner. WaniKani is opt-in, authenticated by your own token, and imports straight from WaniKani to your device; Hex Pro never sees any of it, and the app never writes to your account. Importing an Anki package or a Mochi export uses no network at all: the file is read on your phone, Sol reads the cards and leaves any sounds or pictures in the package unopened, and nothing about it goes to Hex Pro, Anki, AnkiWeb or Mochi. The only other way data leaves the device is a diagnostics export you trigger yourself from the share sheet.
Pricing
An alarm clock has no servers, so paying once is the honest way to buy it.
Lifetime
US$8.99
One payment. Yours permanently.
Or monthly
US$1.99
Per month, if you would rather not commit. Starts with a three-day free trial.
Planned at launch
Detail
The specifics.
An alarm is not a guarantee. If you are catching a flight or sitting an exam, set a second alarm on another device. The physical challenges involve movement, so use judgement about whether they suit you.
- Platform
- iPhone and iPad, iOS 26.1 or later
- Status
- Feature complete, not yet submitted to the App Store
- Pricing
- Free to use, with three alarms and one challenge each. US$8.99 once or US$1.99 per month for the full version. Planned at launch.
- Challenges
- Six types. One per alarm free, stackable with the full version.
- Reliability
- AlarmKit, re-fire loop, notification bursts, fallback chain, optional Protection Mode
- Privacy
- No Hex Pro account, no analytics, no third-party advertising. Network use: a banner for another Hex Pro app, carrying nothing about you, and an opt-in WaniKani import you start yourself. Importing an Anki or Mochi deck file uses none.
- Accessibility
- Reduce Motion respected throughout, colour-blind-safe and high-contrast challenge palettes, effect-level tiers
Questions worth asking.
- What happens if I can't finish a challenge?
- The alarm comes back. Dismissing it schedules a five-second countdown that loops until the challenges are done, so there is no state in which the alarm is silenced and you are still asleep. There is also an emergency stop for genuine emergencies, which ends the alarm for good.
- Will it go off if my phone is on silent or in a Focus mode?
- Yes. Sol is built on AlarmKit, so its alarms are owned by iOS itself rather than by the app. They break through Silent mode and Focus, take over the lock screen, appear in the Dynamic Island and StandBy, and are forwarded to Apple Watch by the system.
- Does Sol work if I force-quit the app?
- Yes. Because the alarms are scheduled with the system, they fire whether or not the app is running. Apps that rely on playing silent background audio to stay alive do not survive being force-quit overnight.
- Is there an Android version?
- Not yet. Sol is iOS only at launch because AlarmKit, the framework that makes its alarms reliable, is an Apple framework with no equivalent on Android. An Android version is being considered but is not in development.
- What does Sol send over the internet?
- Two things. The alarm list fetches a banner for another Hex Pro app, a request that carries nothing about you; everyone sees the same banner. If you connect WaniKani, pressing Sync now imports the words you have learned, in a request that goes from your device straight to WaniKani and writes nothing back. Importing an Anki package or a Mochi export is not a third: the file is read on your phone and nothing leaves it. There is no Hex Pro account, no analytics, no third-party advertising and no crash reporting, and motion data from the step and squat challenges is processed in memory and never written to disk.