Wave Alarm 2.3.1

Waking up to the same alarm clock day after week after year can become really boring and routine-inducing. There’s nothing like a great motivator to get up and hit the streets, and for that there’s everything but Wave Alarm.

Nice visuals

It has nifty visuals (although some sections are still living in the days of iOS 5), a nice weather forecast and a digital clock with AM and PM display. The time and date are also shown, as well as the high and the low temperature forecast for that day, plus the weather at that particular time. It uses location services for this feature, so you need to turn that on.

The settings menu hides a few options to change the display color, and there’s the universal (night-stand clock app) ability to swipe up and down on the display to dim or increase the brightness. Everything in there pretty much works as expected, except for the alarm clock function.

Non-working alarm clock

Despite being advertised as an alarm clock utility, Wave Alarm doesn’t deliver on its promise. The main function actually work if you don’t meet certain criteria. First of all, the app has to be open when you go to bed. Even if you lock the screen leaving it open in the background, you still won’t hear any alarms.

The developer admittedly thought it out pretty well. You can wave your hand in front of the camera and snooze the alarm, or touch the phone and the motion sensor will tell it to stop. However, not being able to just lock the phone and go to sleep is a bit of a hassle.

Needs in-app purchases to work

What’s worse is that Bigger Fish LLC forces users to make various in-app purchases to use multiple alarm clock sounds, to select music from the phone’s library and, to actually gain the background alarm ability, “so you never miss a wake up.” Seriously? Like, isn’t that the actual purpose people download this app?

Add to watchlist:

Clock / timer

• Timer+ 2.1.2
• Timerlist 1.1.3
• CALC 3.4