Who makes Fifi

Fifi is an independent iOS app, and the guides carry the same byline because they are written by whoever builds it rather than by an agency hired to fill a blog. When one of them says the behavior was verified against the iOS 26.2 SDK, that means it was compiled and the output read — not lifted from a changelog.

Why an alarm that calls you

Because the alarm on your phone stops working and nobody can tell you why. The usual explanations — go to bed earlier, put the phone across the room, buy something louder — all treat it as a discipline problem. It mostly is not. In deep sleep the arousal threshold is high enough that noise above 100 decibels does not reliably wake some people, so “make it louder” has a hard ceiling; and a sound that has been identical and harmless every morning for a year is exactly what a nervous system is built to filter out.

What almost nobody sleeps through is a phone call from a person. That is not about volume — a ringtone is often quieter than an alarm. It is that a call implies someone is waiting. Fifi is an attempt to build a morning alarm on that mechanism instead of on decibels. The alarm itself says Fifi is calling; you stop it, and then a character reads you the weather, the headlines and a voice note if one is waiting, in different words every morning. Nobody is literally dialling you — iOS does not let an app fake an incoming call, and this site does not draw one.

What is verified, and what is not

The guides separate those two things. So does this page.

• Verified here: the AlarmKit integration compiles against the iOS 26.2 SDK, and a repeating alarm set through the app has fired on real hardware and stayed armed afterwards.
• Documented by Apple, not yet independently observed here: that AlarmKit alerts sound through silent mode. Firing through Focus has been confirmed on device.
• Not shipped: Fifi is in development. It is not on the App Store, it has no reviews, and there is no rating anywhere on this site because there is nothing yet to rate. If anything here reads like a launched product, that is a mistake — please say so.

The guides

The guides are written to be useful whether or not you ever install anything. Where a claim comes from research it is cited at the end of the post; where it is reasoning rather than a finding, the post says so. That includes the one place the research contradicted what I had originally written, which was the snooze button.