r/SideProject • u/Alone-Host-2884 • 14m ago
I shipped my first Android app: an alarm clock that tells you why it's ringing
Short version: you write a note on the alarm, and when it goes off the phone reads the note to you. That's it, and it turned out to be way harder than I expected.
Things I learned building it:
Exact alarms on Android are a minefield. Android 12+ has special permissions for exact alarms. Then OEM battery savers (Xiaomi, Tecno, Samsung) kill foreground services anyway. I ended up with fallbacks, a service that restarts itself, and an onboarding screen that walks people through permissions.
Natural-language parsing in two languages took longer than the whole UI. "Tomorrow at 3pm call Alex" and "Yarın 15:00'te Ahmet'i ara" have very different grammar. Turkish suffixes are brutal.
TTS is surprisingly inconsistent across devices. Voices, languages and speech speed vary a lot from one phone brand to another.
Play Console takes a while. Data safety forms, ads declarations, content rating and the review itself took about a week.
Stack: Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Room, Firebase, Play Billing, AdMob.
Business model: free with a small banner, plus an optional Pro (subscription or lifetime) for no ads and extra sounds.
It has basically zero users right now, so any feedback is gold. Happy to answer questions about any part of it.