An alarm that stays on your phone

August 16, 2026

Open a popular mission alarm and the first screen is often an account wall. Email, Apple, Google, sometimes a tracker that would like your sleep graph too. The pitch is sync. The effect is that your 6:30 now lives on someone else's computer, and restoring a phone means remembering a password while you are already late.

Coop was built the other way round. No sign-up. No password. No cloud account for your alarms. The database is SQLite on the device. Preferences sit in a fast local store. If we disappeared tomorrow, your mornings would still be on the handset you already hold. That is a product choice, not a missing feature we have not staffed.

What never leaves

Alarms, labels, repeat days, snooze policy, streak counts, history, which missions you enabled: all local. Backup is a file you export when you want, encrypted, through the system share sheet into Files, Drive, or wherever you keep boring important things. Restore is the inverse. We do not paywall that. Locking a person out of their own times would be a sour trick.

Pro is a store purchase through RevenueCat with an anonymous ID. The App Store or Play account is how you restore Pro on a new phone. That is the store's job. It is not a Coop login.

Widgets and the lock-screen countdown read from an app group on the same phone. They do not phone home.

What leaves, on a short leash

Four missions ask a vision model whether a photo matches a promise: object hunt, sky, make-the-bed, custom proof. The frame goes to a stateless function that holds an API key, checks the picture, and stores nothing we can later browse. If the radio is dead, a lenient on-device path still lets you dismiss, because an alarm that bricks when the tower is down is malpractice.

Barcode and place-match never need that hop. They decode or hash on the device. You can run Coop on a plane in airplane mode for every mission that is not waiting on a model, and even those degrade instead of trapping you.

The privacy page is the legal version of this paragraph. The FAQ is the short one.

Why competitors ask anyway

Sync across two phones is nicer with an account. Sleep coaching wants a graph. Ads want a profile. Uninstall-prevention on Android sometimes wants device-admin powers that feel like spyware even when the intent is "please do not delete me at 6:31." Alarmy's listing is explicit about optional device manager and accessibility services for anti-quit features. Some people want that. Some people would rather lose a fight with their past self than grant those hooks.

We reschedule if you kill the process. We cannot out-admin the Samsung battery manager. That fight lives in OEM settings. An account would not have saved you there.

The trade is real: buy a new phone, forget to import the backup file, and you will set your alarms again. That is ten minutes. It is not a hostage situation.

What this has to do with waking up

Very little, directly. You can wake up with a logged-in app. Plenty of people do. The indirect bit is trust at 11pm. If the setup flow is "create an account, confirm email, allow tracking, watch an ad," a subset of heavy sleepers bounce and keep the stock Clock. Those are the people who then google why Samsung ate their third-party alarm. Reducing the setup to "grant notifications and exact alarms" is how we try to keep them.

If you are comparing feature lists, the Alarmy alternative note is the straight one. Missions still matter more than the login screen; start with which mission gets you out of bed. For a shelf of options, use the 2026 roundup.

Free Coop is a basic rooster with slide-to-dismiss. Pro is the missions, widgets and longer history. Neither one asks for your email. If a screen in the app ever does, it is a bug.

A note on photos, because this is where people get twitchy. The vision missions send a frame, get a yes or no, and we do not keep a gallery of your unmade bed. You can switch those four missions off and live on barcode, maths and steps forever. Plenty of Pro users do. The camera permission is then unused. iOS and Android will still list it if the binary contains the code path, which is an OS quirk, not a secret upload.

Backups: do one after you have the week looking right. Store the file somewhere you can find half-asleep after a cracked screen. A backup on the same phone only is a souvenir. Family members who share a handset should not share a Coop file unless they want each other's 5:40.

Lost phone: whoever finds it gets your alarm times, which is a dull prize. They do not get a Coop cloud of sleep graphs because there is not one. Change your store password the usual way. Pro follows the store account.

Reviews that call a no-account app "unfinished" are usually asking for cloud sync. We declined that on purpose. The cost is real on a second device. The benefit is that a leak of our servers cannot include your 6:30 because we do not keep it.

You can get Coop on the App Store or Google Play. The download page keeps both buttons in one place.

References

Coop privacy policy. What is stored on device, and what a vision check does with a frame.
Android Developers. Data and backup overviews for Auto Backup, which is the user's cloud, not a developer database.
Apple. App Store Restore Purchases, the actual mechanism for Pro on a new iPhone without a Coop account.
Alarmy Play Store listing (permissions: Device Manager, Accessibility for prevent-turn-off). Compare with Coop's narrower ask.
RevenueCat. Anonymous App User IDs, used so billing does not require an email we would then have to guard.