About ByeBed

Last updated: May 26, 2026

The 6-snooze problem

ByeBed was built by a chronic snoozer who hit the button six times every morning and was tired of being late. Every alarm app on the market gave the same answer: more friction. A louder ring. A math problem. A QR code on the bathroom mirror.

None of it worked. Because a half-asleep brain is a problem-solver. It finds the cancel button. It guesses the multiple-choice math. It memorizes where the QR code is. It wants to go back to sleep, and given any out, it will take it.

What changed in 2025

In June 2025, Apple released AlarmKit, a new iOS framework for system-level alarms. For the first time, an app could schedule an alarm that rang on silent mode, on Do Not Disturb, and that the OS refused to let the user cancel without completing a mandatory action.

ByeBed is the first alarm app built entirely on AlarmKit. Not bolted on. Not as a fallback. The whole product is designed around the constraint Apple gave us: you cannot cancel the alarm. The only way to stop it is to complete a mission.

Why the missions are different

We chose missions specifically designed to defeat the half-asleep brain:

• Typed math, not multiple choice. You have to write the answer on a numeric keypad. No guessing.
• Push-ups counted by the front camera, using Apple Vision body pose detection. Real reps. No motion-fakes.
• Photo of the sky, verified by an on-device recognition model. You have to actually find a window.
• 12 mission types total, so the brain never builds a shortcut against any single one.

How we think about privacy

Everything runs on your device. Alarms, missions, sensors, the math, the camera detection — all local. We don't have an account system because we don't need one. We don't have a backend because there's nothing to back up. If you uninstall ByeBed, your data is gone the moment the app is removed.

The only thing that briefly leaves your phone is the photo mission verification, which calls Google Gemini once per mission to check whether the photo matches the prompt. The image is not stored and we never see it. Full details on the privacy page.

The team

ByeBed is built and operated by Louis Hubert Cottineau, an indie iOS developer based in Tbilisi, Georgia. The app is supported by a small group of beta testers and feedback from the App Store reviewers who, like the founder, were tired of being late.

If you have feedback, a bug, or a mission idea, we read every email at [email protected]. See the contact page for response times and the kinds of things we can help with.

What's next

Short term: more mission types calibrated for different sleep profiles (light vs heavy sleepers, morning vs night chronotypes). Better push-up accuracy. More natural photo prompts.

Long term: ByeBed exists to make the snooze button feel impossible. Everything we ship is judged on whether it makes "just one more minute" harder than getting out of bed.