Awake app forces heavy sleepers to complete missions

Awake makes snooze button users earn their mornings

A new iOS app called Awake launched Monday alongside iOS 26, targeting heavy sleepers with a simple idea: don’t let people silence alarms with a tap. Instead, Awake requires users to complete interactive missions to turn alarms off, using physical and mental tasks to ensure they truly wake up.

Missions are intentionally varied to engage different parts of the brain and body, making it harder to slip back into sleep. Examples include:

• Rotating the iPhone to a target orientation
• Completing a short set of push-ups or walking steps
• Solving math problems, puzzles, or doing a language lesson

Beyond those core missions, Awake differentiates itself with several convenience and behavior-focused features: a customizable Morning Briefing that surfaces weather and calendar items configured the night before, integration with Block to restrict social apps at wake, and a sleep planner that recommends bed times based on desired sleep length and wake time.

The app is the brainchild of Leo Mehlig, maker of the daily planner Structured. He built Awake after Apple released Alarm Kit in iOS 26, which lets developers create full-screen alert experiences for alarms and timers. Awake is free to download, with a $1.75/month or $19.99/year premium tier unlocking extra missions like scanning a QR code, turning on a light, or reciting a mantra.

Mehlig also plans a “Wake Up Check” that uses step-count data to verify movement after a mission; if the user remains motionless, Awake will re-alert to prevent falling back asleep. The concept aims to close the loop between completing a dismissal task and actually becoming active.

Awake enters a crowded space of mission-based alarms like Alarmy and Mathe Alarm, but it leans into platform-level features and a broader behavioral stack—briefings, social blocking, sleep planning—to build a morning routine rather than just an alarm tone. Think of it as turning a passive alert into a short coaching session that nudges users into motion.

For product teams and organizations, Awake underscores a couple of trends worth watching: using device sensors and platform hooks to close behavioral loops, and pairing functionality with friction to change habits. Practical use cases extend beyond groggy commuters to shift workers, care staff who must be alert at specific times, or wellness programs that graft healthy micro-routines onto existing devices.

If you’re evaluating how to apply Alarm Kit or build behavior-change mechanics into mobile products, there’s an opportunity to measure outcomes: reduced snooze rates, improved on-time arrivals, and changes in morning engagement. That’s where careful experimentation and analytics matter—designing missions that work across demographics, measuring false dismissals, and tuning thresholds so the app nudges without annoying.

Awake is live now for iOS 26 users and presents a neat case study in leveraging new OS-level APIs to rethink an age-old problem: getting out of bed. Whether it becomes a mainstream replacement for the snooze button will depend on how well its missions balance efficacy with user tolerance—but it’s a clear example of design and platform capability working together to change daily behavior.