An alarm that rings through Silent Mode

Problem

Heavy sleepers are late not because they cannot hear the alarm but because they dismiss it half asleep. Wakora's idea was simple: the alarm must not stop until a task is completed. Arithmetic, shaking the phone, walking steps, scanning a barcode left in another room.

Two things broke in the first release. The alarm was built on local notifications, so with Silent Mode or Focus on, the sound was muted; the alarm "fired" but the phone stayed quiet. And when the user swiped the app away, everything scheduled went with it.

Decisions

• System-level alarm plus protected background audio. At alarm time the app takes the audio session and does not release it until the task is done. Silent Mode and Focus do not cut it.
• Layered fallback. If iOS terminates the app, a notification chain fires anyway, and a backup alarm is scheduled a few minutes after the main one. If scheduling was ever interrupted, the app says so inside.
• Snooze is not banned, it is priced. Each snooze demands a longer task than the last, with a daily cap. Banning it pushed people to delete the app.
• A check two minutes after dismissal. "Still up?" catches going back to bed instead of silently rewarding it.

Outcome

20 missions, 8 of which cannot be done in bed. 11 store languages. Rewriting onboarding as a persuasion sequence took day-one return from 16% to 30%, measured with funnel counters rather than guessed.

In August 2026 a trademark dispute arrived: the app had shipped as "WakeGuard". I chose a rename over an appeal; it became Wakora, subscriptions and streaks carried over, store copy and the website changed the same day. Lesson: check the trademark database before the keyword tool.

There was also a privacy rejection: the photo-match mission uses Vision, so Apple required a separate "Face data" section in the privacy policy. Updated, passed in one round.

Wakora is the portfolio's strongest organic signal today, and the app where I learned everything else: paywall placement, trial length, collecting ratings, when ads burn money and when they convert.