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Comment by franze | Hacker News Reader

question: what happens when I'm offline? what happens when I'm offline like for a month and use this app with 3 different alarms per day?

the big questions: do you (kinda) guarantee that the alarm clock will go off, even in these extreme circumstances?

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If you're online, in wifi, it will play the song. But if you're offline it will play your phone's default ringtone. I did it that way so it wouldn't eat your data. Because downloading a new song everyday can add up if you have a limited data plan. So in theory you could be offline indefinitely and the alarm should just work. And then when you come back online, you'll be able to hear the song again.

alternatively you could use an mp3 from the users audio library and play that one, but well it could be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3 so then the user would have an issue.

Haha that song would not be good for an alarm clock. It's interesting, I actually allowed people to choose a song for a backup ringtone before, but I ended up taking out the feature. Everyone I showed it to found it kinda confusing. So now I just use the first default ringtone in the phone.

How about preloading of songs over wifi only. Another way could be to automatically enable wifi a few minutes before the alarm time.

Defaulting to standard ringtone if no song was downloaded.

That's a good suggestion. Right now it actually does cache the song when it's on wiFi, so it often works correctly. But, I find when my phone gets low on memory, the cache is sometimes cleared, and if I'm not in WiFi, it will go back to the default ringtone.

Actually automatically enabling wiFi is a good idea. I just assumed most people would try to be in wiFi as much as they could be, so I assumed the user would do their best to make that happen. Maybe I shouldn't have assumed that.

It wouldn't be much of a deal to me either, as I'd just use a Wifi-enabling task. Though I'd say many users would appreciate such feature.

Yeah I like it. That sounds like a relatively easy thing to implement, which could "fix" having your phone's default alarm sound instead of the song of the day.

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