The problem
I'm a heavy sleeper. Not "hit snooze once" heavy. I would turn off three stacked alarms in my sleep and wake up an hour late with zero memory of doing it. The problem was never hearing the alarm. It was that turning it off had become a reflex I could do half-asleep, from bed, without ever really waking up.
So I built Mornio.
The idea
Mornio moves the off switch away from the bed. You pick a QR code or a household barcode (the back of a cereal box, a sticker on the bathroom mirror, the label on your coffee tin) and place it across the room. When the alarm goes off, the only way to stop it is to physically get up, walk over, and scan that exact code with your phone.
If you try to silence it without scanning, the alarm comes back. And a few minutes after you scan, Mornio runs a second stay-awake check, because getting out of bed once doesn't mean you won't faceplant back into it.
How it's built
- AlarmKit (iOS 26) for scheduling and the reliable, system-level ringing. This was the big unlock: a normal third-party app can't reliably ring like a real alarm, and AlarmKit finally makes that possible.
- The camera for scanning the QR code or barcode, matched against the specific code you registered the night before.
- Everything stays on-device. No account, no ads. The codes you pick never leave your phone.
What I learned
The hard part wasn't the scanning, it was trust. An alarm has exactly one job, and if it fails once, you delete it forever. Most of the work went into making the ringing bulletproof and making the "I dismissed it without really scanning" edge cases impossible to game while half-asleep.
Try it, or tell me I'm wrong
It's live on the App Store (iPhone, iOS 26.1+): https://apps.apple.com/app/id6780983853
Site: https://mornioapp.com
I'd love feedback from other heavy sleepers or shift workers:
- Does scan-to-dismiss sound like it would actually get you up, or annoying enough you'd rage-delete it?
- If you've tried it: was the first-morning setup (placing a code, picking what to scan) clear or confusing?
Happy to go deeper on the AlarmKit implementation in the comments.
