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A lot of todo-list apps such as Wunderlist offer some kind of reminder feature which usually just fires off a notification.

But I have never encountered an app that offer a similar notification view as the built in preinstalled alarm clock. You know, that locks the phone and offers a snooze option.

This makes me wonder if the alarm clock functionality that is built into the preinstalled iOs app from Apple including setting time or add a snooze button etc is only available for that particular app?

Since I'm a designer without any coding skills I only want to know if it possible or not.

Tony Bolero
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3 Answers3

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Unfortunately this is unavailable for developers. You can check all of alarm clock apps in AppStore, all of them are using the standard local notifications. Which will fire once and that's all. You can of course set your custom sound and change couple of options, but it will never work like one build in Clock app inside iPhone.

You can read more about local notifications in Apple documentation: https://developer.apple.com/reference/usernotifications/unnotificationrequest

Mike Mikina
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I figured Alarmy is constantly playing (when there is an alarm set up) a silent sound in the background. Like Spotify, but silent. This keeps the app active all the time. I came to this conclusion by logging the result AVAudioSession.sharedInstance().isOtherAudioPlaying (Swift 4) in my own application. Whenever Alarmy is terminated it returns false, whenever Alarmy is running in the background it returns true. Same thing happens for the app linked by Ernesto Elsäßer.

I used the same technique and I also used this pod to trigger a function when the time comes and start the real music.

I did this for testing and am not going to make an app out of it because playing silent sounds in the background is against Apple's rules. I don't know how Alarmy (or other apps that use this same method) got away with it.

Some related questions:

Also you can check this article out.

degemenc
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This app seems to do exactly this, but I have no clue how ...

I tested it, and it managed to start playing music on a locked device at an arbitrarily chosen time, and for way longer than the 30s timeframe allowed for notification sounds. Further, the music is streamed from an online radio station, meaning they found a way to ...

  1. wake up the app from a scheduled notification without user interaction
  2. create a socket connection to a radio station in the background
  3. start playing sound in the background for an indefinite amount of time

I also tried out the alarm in Airplane Mode, and it still played a locally stored backup song, so it probably doesn't abuse the VoiP background mode or push notifications, but really is triggered by a local notification ...

So although I can't tell how, it looks like there is an App Store Review-proof way to create a real alarm app.

(I am not affiliated with the developers of this app, just did some research on what's possible.)

Ernesto Elsäßer
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