Features

Fifi is an alarm clock for iPhone. What follows is everything it does, in the order it happens to you on a morning.

It is a real alarm

Fifi sets a real alarm — the same kind Apple’s Clock app sets, which your iPhone fires by itself. It rings when your phone is on silent. It rings through Focus and Do Not Disturb. And it does not need an internet connection to go off, so nothing about your morning depends on your signal.

The distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because for most of the iPhone’s life third-party alarms were notifications wearing an alarm’s clothes and failed in a dozen ordinary ways. Not every alarm app can do this even now — there is a way to check which have, and it takes about a minute.

One thing to be straight about: your iPhone shows the alarm, not Fifi. You get the normal alarm screen, with Stop and Snooze. The call is what happens after you stop it.

Someone is on the other end

Once the alarm is stopped, a character speaks to you. There are ten of them, and every one is the same cat in a different costume rather than ten separate characters — Fifi in a trench coat, Fifi in a tiara, Fifi with a whistle. Each has a room the app paints behind the call.

All ten are on the cast page, with the greeting each one wakes you with, playable. A recording of your own goes inside the call, in the voice note’s slot below, with the character’s own voice either side of it. The one control on the call is hanging up.

The briefing is a set of switches

What the voice actually says is assembled from segments, and every one of them — including the hello and the goodbye — is individually toggleable. Turn the news off and the call skips it. The call is only as long as your morning actually is.

1. Greeting — The character you picked says hello, in their own words rather than a script they all share.
2. Voice note — A recording played inside the call. Your own voice, or one you asked somebody else for.
3. Weather — Your local forecast for the day, from Apple Weather.
4. News — A few headlines and their sources, in the category you chose.
5. Sign-off — Their goodbye, and then the call ends on its own. Nothing to dismiss.

49 ringtones

The sound the alarm itself makes, before the call starts. They are grouped by what is making the noise — bells, handsets, voices, digital, melodic, alarms — and all 49 of them are playable in your browser, which is the one claim on this page you can check by ear before you believe it.

What it deliberately does not do

It does not track your sleep with the microphone, score your nights, or make you solve a math problem before it stops. Those are real approaches and other apps do them well — the tradeoffs are covered in the guide to alarm apps for heavy sleepers. Fifi is one idea: the thing that wakes you should be somebody rather than something.

It also does not ship yet. What it will cost is settled; the waitlist is how you hear when it arrives.