Reminders in your tone, per habit

In May a user messaged me: "Real Alarm does nothing when I tap it." That was the start of two weeks of debugging.

The card was dimmed because AlarmKit permission had not been granted yet. So far, expected. What was not expected: a first tap on a dimmed card is supposed to trigger the iOS permission dialog. The dialog never showed up. SwiftUI was swallowing the tap before the auth flow could even start. Dead end. The card looked dead because in that moment it was.

The v1.1.14 fix is short: the dimmed card is no longer dimmed in the tap-handler sense. It just looks dimmed. Tap, system dialog, yes or no, the card becomes live. Two weeks of bug archaeology for a handful of lines telling SwiftUI that disabled-look and disabled-interaction are two different things.

Why AlarmKit at all. iOS 26 finally gave us an official API for real alarms. Before that you had to work around it with silent background audio, Live Activities, or other hacks that all carried baggage. For a habit that has to actually happen, like medication or waking up, standard notifications are not enough. When your phone is silenced, the standard channel stays silenced. AlarmKit does not.

A compliance side note: there are a few forum threads claiming Apple requires AlarmKit apps to be standalone or single-purpose. That is not what Apple actually requires. They require an honest usage description in the Info.plist and a legitimate use case. For DopaLoop, "medication and routine anchors for ADHD users" is about as legitimate as a use case gets.

What got clearer to me through all of this: ADHD and anchor routines need hardware guarantees. Notifications are soft guarantees, they arrive if the system decides they matter enough. If your medication routine depends on the system deciding it matters enough, you have the wrong lever. The tier below, the standard channel, is fine for habits you would do anyway when you remember. But the habits you do not remember on your own are exactly the ones that need real volume.

That was also the reason to split loudness and persistence in v1.1.14. In the old model both sat inside one choice, which meant: anyone who wanted loudness got persistence baked in, and the other way around. Those are independent questions. How loud the first time? How stubborn after that? One says nothing about the other. Now they are two pickers. Whatever you had set keeps working. No one wakes up tomorrow morning with an alarm that used to be a whisper.

Up next is a separate toggle for repeat frequency on anchor habits. That was supposed to be part two of the split, but it would have pushed the v1.1.14 release. It will land in v1.1.16 at the latest.

If you build an ADHD app, you know this pattern: every feature step is also an anti-shame step. Real Alarm for medication is not "you need more discipline." It is "your brain works differently, here is the right loudness for it." That was the reason to build this in the first place. The dead-end bug cost two weeks. The right feature underneath was right the whole time.