Frequently asked questions

Yes. Once you have allowed alarms, the app uses the iPhone’s own alarm system, the same one the Clock app uses. The ring/silent switch does not stop it, and neither does Do Not Disturb or any Focus.

The one thing that does stop it is alarm access being switched off for the app. If nothing is ringing at all, in any mode, that is where to look — the next answer covers it.

Nearly always, this is alarm access. The app needs your permission to use the iPhone’s alarm system, and without it the alarm cannot ring at all — there is no quieter, second-best version of it that still gets through.

1. Open the iPhone’s Settings app, scroll down and tap the app.
2. Turn on Allow Alarms.
3. Switch the alarm off and back on again so it registers.
4. Set a test alarm a couple of minutes ahead and check that it rings on its own, out loud, without you touching anything.

In Bird Rise and Rise in Grace you do not have to go looking for it: when alarm access is missing, an Allow Alarms banner appears at the top of the home screen and takes you straight to the right setting.

Two things it is not, both of which people reasonably suspect:

• It is not your Wi-Fi or your internet connection. Alarms do not need either.
• It is not caused by closing the app, or by leaving it open. Neither makes any difference to whether the alarm fires.

If a test alarm still does not ring once alarm access is on, write to us with the time you set and what happened instead.

The alarm does still fire, and it does still play. What changes is how loud it is. iOS keeps alert volume — ringtone, alarms, notifications — separate from media volume, so when another app is holding the audio, the alarm comes through much quieter than usual and is easy to sleep through.

To turn the alert volume up:

1. Open the iPhone’s Settings app and tap Sounds & Haptics.
2. Drag the slider under Ringtone and Alerts most of the way to the right.
3. Just below it, turn off Change with Buttons, so the side buttons cannot quietly lower it again.

Worth knowing before you do: that slider also sets your ringtone and text tone volume, so calls and messages get louder too. It does not change music or video volume. If louder texts at night bother you, Do Not Disturb silences notifications but never silences alarms.

One more thing to check — if your audio is going to headphones or a Bluetooth speaker, the alarm follows it there. Disconnecting before bed helps.

In Bird Rise there is a second fix, in the app itself: open Settings, and under Default Settings raise Max alarm volume and turn on Always increase volume. That toggle exists for exactly this situation — it lets the volume rise even while a video or music is playing — and it is off by default.

This one is not something you did. It is a bug in Apple’s iOS 26 alarm system, it affects several alarm apps rather than just ours, and we have reported it to Apple.

Until Apple ships a fix, re-creating the alarm from scratch clears it:

1. Delete the alarm.
2. Restart your iPhone — power it fully off, then back on.
3. Create the alarm again.

The restart matters. It is what makes iOS register the new alarm cleanly instead of reusing the confused one.

This is a known iOS issue, not a setting you got wrong. When an alarm in one of our apps and an alarm in Apple’s Clock app are set for the same minute, iOS can play only one of them and skip the other.

Our apps cannot see, silence or change Clock alarms, and the Clock app cannot change ours, so neither side can sort out the clash. What works is keeping them apart:

• Use one alarm for that time. Our app’s alarm already rings on silent and through Focus, so it does not need a Clock alarm beside it.
• If you want a backup, set it a few minutes later, for example 6:30 in our app and 6:35 in the Clock app, never the same minute.

The buzz is not something the app adds. It is the iPhone’s own alert haptics, and iOS gives apps no control over them at all, which is why there is no switch for it inside the app to point you at. You can turn it off on the phone:

1. Open the iPhone’s Settings app and tap Sounds & Haptics.
2. Tap Haptics.
3. Turn off Play Haptics in Ring Mode.
4. Turn off Play Haptics in Silent Mode.

The alarm still plays out loud, so you wake to the sound with no buzz.

Do note that this is phone-wide: texts, notifications and calls stop buzzing too. They still ring and still appear on screen.

If you cannot find Haptics on your version of iOS, Settings › Accessibility › Touch › Vibration, switched off, does the same job. Try that one second — it silences vibration everywhere, including emergency alerts.

If your app asks you to complete a small challenge to dismiss the alarm, there are two common reasons it does not appear.

Which button you tapped. The lock screen shows Stop next to the challenge button. Stop is Apple’s own button — it ends the alarm and skips the challenge entirely. Only the challenge button opens the app and starts it. At the moment, pressing a volume button, or swiping the alert away on your way to the Home Screen, counts as Stop as well. We know, and we are working on it.

Two alarms set for the same time. They ring together, and the app can open the challenge belonging to the other one. Turning off or deleting the duplicate sorts it out.

In Bird Rise, each alarm has its own set of regions, and you can change them whenever you like.

The app picks a starting point once, when you first set it up, from your iPhone’s Region setting rather than from your location. That guess is deliberately wide: a phone set to the United States or Canada starts with all four North America regions turned on, so the alarm can pull a bird from anywhere on the continent. If you live in one corner of it, that is too broad.

To narrow it:

1. On the home screen, tap the alarm you want to change.
2. Tap the Birdsongs row.
3. Tap Worldwide at the top once. That clears whatever is selected now.
4. Under your continent, tap the one region you want.

The Birdsongs row should now name that region, instead of reading something like “Western North America +3”. Step 3 is the one people miss: when several regions are already ticked, tapping one of them takes it out rather than leaving only it selected. Going through Worldwide first avoids that.

Two things worth knowing. Regions are set per alarm, so repeat this on each alarm you use. And the sixteen regions are broad on purpose, so that each one still holds enough birds to keep mornings varied. Eastern North America, for example, covers the whole southeast.

With Pro there is also My Favorites, at the top of that same list. It plays only the birds you have hearted, which is the way to get an exact set rather than a whole region. Choose them in Settings, under Favorite Birdsongs.

Not in every app yet — it is something we are working on, and we would rather not promise a date we might miss.

In the meantime, when the alarm rings on the lock screen there is a Stop button beside the challenge that ends it straight away, with nothing to complete first.

Yes, in Rise in Grace. Each alarm has its own time and its own repeat days, so you can keep one for work days and another for a slower weekend morning:

1. On the Rise in Grace home screen, tap the alarm you already have.
2. Under Repeat, turn off the days you don’t want it on.
3. Tap Save.
4. Scroll down to Manage Your Alarms and tap Add alarm.
5. Set the time for the new alarm.
6. Under Repeat, turn off the days this one should skip.
7. Tap Save.

Each alarm is labeled at the top of the home screen, for example “Weekdays” or “Weekends”. The first alarm is free; more than one needs Rise in Grace+.

The alarm itself needs no connection. The sounds it plays are stored on your iPhone, so it rings perfectly well offline, airplane mode included.

Some other parts of the apps do need a connection — reading a bird’s story, browsing artwork, loading a full passage — and those will tell you when they cannot reach us. None of it affects whether your alarm goes off.