ShiftChain

One alarm is never enough. There's the one that wakes you, the one that says get in the shower, and the one that means leave now - and whenever your start time moves, every one of them has to be set again. ShiftChain sets them as a chain. Give it a routine - the steps before you leave and the time you have to be there - and it schedules every alarm for every day, without being asked. TWO WAYS TO SAY WHEN - Repeat days: a routine that runs Monday to Friday, or whichever weekdays you pick. Chains are created two weeks ahead, no calendar needed. - Calendar: if your days are already in iCloud, Google, Exchange or a subscribed work calendar, tell ShiftChain which event titles mean which routine - "Early", "Night ×", "AM Ward 4" - and it reads them from there. On a rotating roster, this is the one for you. SET IT UP ONCE 1. Create a routine: a name, a colour, a start time. 2. Say when it happens: repeat days, or keywords that match your calendar. 3. Give each place you leave from a travel time. 4. Build the steps before you leave - wake, shower, breakfast - each offset from the one after it. Leave = start time − travel time. Everything else falls out from there. A step done on site, like stretching before class, counts back from Start instead, and Leave comes forward to fit it. If your calendar carries exact times, switch on "use calendar event start time" and ShiftChain takes them from the event. HANDS-FREE SCHEDULING There's no Activate button to forget. ShiftChain re-reads your calendar every time you open it, scans up to 60 days ahead, and schedules whatever is missing. When the calendar has moved since last time, it shows you which days changed, which were cancelled, and which are new. Rescheduling always sets the new alarms before cancelling the old ones, so a failure halfway through can never leave you with no alarm at all. Every alarm is checked back against iOS afterwards - a day reads "5/5" only once iOS has confirmed all five. REAL ALARMS, NOT NOTIFICATIONS ShiftChain is built on Apple's AlarmKit, so these are alarms in the system sense: they ring through silent mode and survive a reboot. Your Lock Screen carries the whole chain for the day as a Live Activity - finished steps ticked off, the live one marked NEXT or RINGING - so at 5am you can see what's coming without unlocking anything. Same in the Dynamic Island. PER-DAY CONTROL - Swap the location for one day without touching its stored travel time - Nudge a whole day, or a single step, earlier or later - Silence one alarm and keep the rest of the chain - Add a one-off alarm to any day, then keep it in the routine's steps if it sticks - Two events matching the same day? Pick the real one inline - Ignore titles that keep false-matching - Assign a routine by hand, mark a day off, or revert a day to the calendar BUILT FOR THE 4AM VERSION OF YOU Colour-coded routines, so a week reads at a glance. Overnight starts that run past midnight don't spawn a phantom day the next morning. Fly somewhere else and every alarm re-resolves to local time. A guided tour on first launch, an in-app help centre, and - when nothing matches - a diagnostics panel that tells you exactly why: calendar access, how many events were found, and the titles it actually saw. WHY "SHIFTCHAIN" It started with one shift worker. Her roster changed every week, it lived in her calendar, and every change meant resetting a handful of alarms by hand. So the app read the calendar and set the whole chain for her. Then she took a job with regular hours, and the chain turned out to be the point: the same steps, set once, run as one. Routines on repeat days came next. The name stayed. PRIVATE BY DESIGN No account. No server. No analytics. No ads. The app contains no network code at all. ShiftChain reads your calendar on your device and never writes to it, and nothing you enter ever leaves your iPhone. REQUIRES iOS 26 or later, for AlarmKit. iPhone only.