Type the code
Six digits, freshly generated, with no runs or repeats to make it easy to fumble. One wrong digit and you get a new one.
A code, right now
Alarm ringing
Set an alarm you
can't turn off from bed.
WakeHard rings at full volume through Silent mode and Focus. It keeps ringing until you've typed a six-digit code, shaken the phone fifty times, and photographed a room you can only reach by standing up.
iPhone · iOS 26.1 or later · free
Three locks, in order, every time.
You can't choose which ones to use. An alarm you can weaken in advance is one you'll weaken at 6am.
Shake it off
The screen fills green from the bottom as you shake. Fifty direction changes, counted from the accelerometer — a lazy swing won't register. Stop moving and the level drains back down.
Drag to fill
Go find the room
It names a room and shows you a picture of it. Walk there, photograph it, and the phone decides. The kitchen, the bathroom or the living room — never the bedroom.
Point the camera at anything that room contains. No dishwasher? The sink, the fridge or the counter will do.
What happens when you try to get out of it.
Every shortcut a half-asleep person reaches for, and what the app does about it.
- You leave the phone on silent.
- It rings anyway. WakeHard schedules through AlarmKit, the same system layer Apple's own Clock uses, so the ring/silent switch and any Focus are bypassed. It plays at alarm volume, not media volume.
- You press Stop on the Lock Screen.
- The sound stops for thirty seconds. Then the alarm comes back, and keeps coming back, until the three challenges are actually done. Since iOS 26.1 the Stop button belongs to the system and can't be removed, so the app makes it pointless instead.
- You swipe the app away mid-challenge.
- The noise carries on — the alarm holds a background audio session — and the challenge you were part-way through starts over. A half-typed code is gone when you come back.
- You turn the volume down.
- The app pushes its own level back up and fires a burst of haptics. The sound also escalates on its own over the first forty-five seconds you spend ignoring it.
- You force the phone off, or delete the app.
- Then you win. iOS gives no app the power to lock you out of your own phone, and any app claiming otherwise is lying to you. WakeHard makes quitting deliberate and annoying rather than impossible — which, at 6am, turns out to be enough.
The camera never sends anything anywhere.
The photo challenge recognises rooms with Vision, Apple's on-device image classifier. Your photo is examined in memory on the phone and discarded. It is never uploaded, never saved to your library, and never seen by us.
There is no account, no sign-in and no analytics. WakeHard has no server, so there is nowhere for your data to go even if we wanted it.
This is also why it works at 6am in a hotel with broken wifi.
- No account. Nothing to sign up for.
- No network. The app makes no requests.
- No stored photos. Analysed, then dropped.
- Alarms stay yours. Kept in the keychain on your device.
Questions you'd reasonably ask.
What if I genuinely need to answer the phone?
Calls, messages and everything else work normally. WakeHard only takes over the screen while an alarm of its own is ringing, and it never blocks the phone app.
What if the camera won't recognise my kitchen?
The bar relaxes as you keep trying, and after six honest attempts the app offers you a different room instead. It will never accept a wrong photo to let you off — that would teach you the challenge is fake — but it will not trap you either.
Can I add a snooze button?
No. Snooze is the thing this app exists to remove. If you want a snooze button, the alarm already built into your phone has an excellent one.
Why does it need iOS 26.1?
AlarmKit is the only iOS interface that lets an app ring through Silent mode and Focus and put a full-screen alert on the Lock Screen. It arrived in iOS 26, and the alert style WakeHard uses arrived in 26.1. On anything older this app could only post a notification you'd swipe away in your sleep.
Does it drain the battery?
Not while it's waiting. The system holds the alarm, so nothing of ours runs until it fires. The audio and camera only wake up once you're already awake.
Is there an Android version?
Not yet. Android's alarm and lock-screen behaviour is different enough that it needs building properly rather than ported badly.