Wake Up Light – Sunrise Alarm

Unfortunately, there were so many features that are locked behind a subscription. If it was a one time purchase, I would definitely consider it more, but I do not want to pay monthly or yearly to turn on my lights automatically. I miss the days and acts like these were a five dollar purchase and that’s it

This is not a stand alone alarm app. It only works if you have SmartHome data it can connect to

Downloaded this thinking it was an app to turn your phone’s screen into a wake up alarm, but it’s an app for controlling your smart lightbulbs in your home. Not clear in the title or discription!

The developer clearly knows what they're doing and saw a need for an app that YES, is needed! The app is easy to troubleshoot and works seamlessly with a beautiful interface. My only complaint, or suggestion rather (which I wouldn't care if I didn't think this app was awesome), is to offer a first week trial then charge for premium. Andreas, you're going to increase your conversation considerably when you make this more accessible and allow people to fall in love with it. You're already priced very right. Consider adding a trial period, and two payment options, the one upfront for the year that you already have and another billed monthly at $1.99 or even $2.99 - you'll increase your retention, your number of sign ups, and your overall profit margin. Again, really beautiful job, you deserve more sign ups, friend!

I’m going to be brutally honest here—this application isn’t worth 15 bucks a year. If I had the extra time and patience, I could do the same exact thing manually using scenes in the home app and save myself 15 bucks per year. I think the subscription model for this application is a stretch; a one-time purchase seems like a better approach, but whatever.

After recent updates, it takes 5+ minutes to update a setting.

All this really does is create several scenes and automations to set light brightness or temperature which clutters the home app (in my case, this created about 10 different scenes and an automation to control each one of those scenes). This is something you could easily do yourself in not a lot of time. I’d personally rather set a “convert to shortcut” automation with multiple steps and waits to adjust the brightness; this way I only have 1 automation to manage and not several different scenes and automations, and the brightness gradient would be a lot more natural. The gradient that is defined by the app is not very clean; when I had this set up with a 10 min ramp up in brightness from 0% to 65%, there were a few small jumps of 2%-5%, and one huge jump in the middle of 20%. This was very alarming and defeats the purpose of the app. On top of all that, a subscription is required to do anything other than create one “ramp up” alarms. If you want to “ramp down” or create multiple alarms, you have to pay $1.49/mo or $14.99/yr. This isn’t terrible, but enough to be a deterrent for me based on the app’s actual functionality.

I used to like this app - it wasn’t convenient, but at least it worked. However, it now takes 15-20 minutes to “create” a new wake up light, and it refuses to update existing lights. The only thing that “sortof” works is to delete all of the automations in HomeKit, which deletes the wake up in the app. Then build it again. Wildly NOT functionally at this point, particularly for the high $$$.

would this app work with smart led light strips?

I just purchased the trial. When I create a shortcut on iOS to activate the light 5 mins from now, nothing happens. I tried to contact them but their contact form on the website errors out