Larky: Alarm for ADHD Brains

Larky is an alarm clock for people who know their worst morning habit: killing the alarm with their eyes shut and waking up an hour too late.

To silence it, you have to do something. Solve a few equations, repeat a sequence, shake the phone, hold it perfectly level, tap disappearing alarm clocks, scan a barcode you stuck on the coffee machine, or get up and photograph a randomly drawn object. By the time you are done, you are awake — that is the whole point.

MISSIONS THAT TURN OFF THE ALARM • Math — a few simple equations • Sequence — memorize and repeat • Shake — the phone really has to move • Balance — hold the phone perfectly level • Reaction — wait for green and tap in time • ReflexTap — whack-a-mole with alarm clocks • Barcode — scan a code you saved yourself • Photo — checked by a model running on your phone

Every mission has its own settings: rounds, difficulty, how many at once. Save your favourite sets as templates.

WAKE-UP CHECK Turning the alarm off is not the end. Larky checks a few minutes later whether you actually got up, and comes back if the phone is lying still.

DEEP SLEEP AND SLEEP CALCULATOR Give it your wake-up time and Larky works out your bedtime in 90-minute cycles, then reminds you in the evening when to go to bed. It works the other way round too: go to bed now, and the app tells you when to get up so the alarm does not land in the middle of deep sleep.

STREAK AND BADGES Every honest wake-up extends your streak. Badges come for persistence and for playing each mission again and again — from the first time to three hundred.

MORNING ROUTINE Once the alarm is off, Larky walks you through your own list: glass of water, meds, stretching. One task after another, with a countdown, so you never stall on what comes next.

DAYTIME NAP QuickNap: set a duration or an end time, and Larky makes sure a short nap does not turn into three hours.

STATS What time you really get up, how many snoozes per morning, and how the last week, month and half a year look.

SOUND AND SETTINGS Gradual volume, forced maximum volume, snooze limits, muting during missions, your own audio files and ringtones downloaded from the cloud.

PRIVACY Photos from the photo mission never leave your phone — an offline model checks them. An account is optional and only moves your data to a new phone; you can switch syncing off completely. You can delete your account from inside the app, without writing to anyone.