Alarm App Demands You Watch Advertisement to Hit "Snooze" Button

When it comes to life in the age of global capitalism, there's probably no better symbol for the worker's burden than the dreaded alarm clock. Although the snooze button offers temporary escape, its betrayal is inevitable, leaving many a weary worker to spam that thing like there's no tomorrow.

That cruel button is the driving force behind Alarmy, a cheery South Korean startup with a mission to "make people's morning successful." Alarmy is one of the top alarm clock apps on both the Apple and Android app stores, logging tens of millions of downloads on both.

Though Alarmy bills itself as an all-day wellness app, its main draw is its wakeup function, a dastardly — if helpful, for some — bit of software that makes you finish a task in order to turn the alarm off.

Alarmy's wake-up errands range from memory games to squat challenges to dreary-eyed math quizzes. It also includes ads, as some drowsy Redditors discovered after popups ads hijacked their snooze bar.

"That will be the last time I use that app," wrote user LoganScheffler, along with a picture of a prompt to "watch ad to snooze 3 minutes."

Curious about the feature, we reached out to Alarmy's parent company Delightroom, which was thrilled to explain the process, though it requested that we frame the feature in a "witty and lighthearted" tone rather than a critical one. ("After all, it’s designed to help people wake up more effectively!" a spokesperson reasoned.)

As for the wake-up ads, Delightroom says that users get to set a maximum number of snoozes for themselves to enjoy in the morning, though the app defaults to three out of the box.

"However," the spokesperson said, "if they really want to snooze just one last time, they have the option to watch an ad to extend snooze only once."

"After that, no more snoozes are allowed — even with an ad. They’ll have to get up!" they added.

Fishing for the "X" on a pop-up ad as your alarm rips you back from dreamland might not be everyone's idea of happy-go-lucky fun, though we'll grant it adds a bit of much needed whimsy to the adpocolypse. "Please stand up and yell Coca Cola at your phone," as one Redditor quipped.

In a bigger sense, ad-based alarm clocks are indicative of the creep of "adtech" into yet another corner of life. Adtech is the layer of software behind nearly every app we use that lets companies manage their ad campaigns — everything from hyper-personal targeted ads to those perfidious fake game popups.

For Delightroom CEO Shin Jae-myung, the alarm app is just the tip of the iceberg. His real bread and butter is DARO, a streamlined adtech platform offering developers a chance to reproduce Alarmy's lucrative marketing setup. With Alarmy, the CEO said in an interview, the company "created a new advertising monetization platform that can be shared with other startups, because it is a waste to use that know-how only internally."

That know-how, like with many other adtech platforms, comes at a hidden cost for consumers. Alarmy's privacy policy — which users must accept to use the app in the first place — contains a huge list of reasons the company is allowed to use your personal data, including to spam you with special offers about affiliated products, to share with third party internet service providers, and to sell to other for-profit advertising firms, like Google's AdMob or BlackRock's AppLovin.

While Alarmy's marketing work is a drop in the bucket compared to the $876 billion global adtech market, it's nonetheless a potent reminder of that old adage: if it's free, you're the product.

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