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Comment by qup | Hacker News Reader

What does it do when it quits working?

Some snoozers I know would just consider that a victory and get back to sleep

The snooze key/process quits working, and it just keeps beeping until you complete the turning the app off process.. probably. (Not OP)

Yes, that's right. And you had to enter a code to turn the alarm off. You couldn't just close the app or hit a button.

There was a great Android alarm app years ago that you'd run in some kind of super admin mode, and you couldn't exit out of it no matter what. Restarting the phone just made it autoload instantly again and stop you from taking focus away from it.

It had modes where you could either shake the phone xx amount of times, or solve math problems, or even take a picture of a barcode (I set mine to my shampoo bottle).

It all worked great until once a 4am alarm got set as 4pm, and I lost access to my phone at 4pm (since I didn't have access to the shampoo bottle). I was offroading on a motorcycle in the middle of the forest, and my phone with offline maps was my navigation. Almost turned into a crazy Darwin awards story in a way.

That's hilarious! My original pass at the alarm app did much the same, but it was too intrusive and not really necessary for my needs. This wasn't Android, though. It was originally an app for the Newton, then I later reimplemented it on the Palm Pilot.

I would assume it keeps ringing. You could potentially have it increase in volume or require gps movement to turn off.

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