Stop turning your phone off when the alarm rings (Android)

To stop yourself turning your phone off when the alarm rings, use Beyond Alarm: it closes the power menu while it rings. Then put the phone out of reach. No Android app can block a forced restart from the hardware buttons, so distance is your backstop.

The short version:

• Beyond Alarm closes the power menu the moment it appears mid-ring, sends you back to the alarm if you press Home, and can stop itself being uninstalled.
• The on-screen power menu can be closed by an alarm app, but since Android 12 only through Android's accessibility service.
• A forced restart from a long hardware press can't be blocked by any app. Nothing on the phone gets a say.
• Uninstalling mid-ring can be slowed down with device administrator access, which adds a deactivation step first.
• The most reliable fix costs nothing: make reaching the phone mean getting out of bed.

Why this is the escape everyone finds

A mission alarm works because stopping it takes effort you can't fake from bed. That makes your half-asleep brain look for the cheapest way out that isn't the mission, and the power button is right there. It is the same failure as turning off an alarm in your sleep, just with one more step.

If this is you, the mission was never the problem. The loophole is.

Five approaches, and what each one covers

Here is what each approach actually stops. Beyond Alarm combines the first three in one app.

The pattern is that software raises the cost of escaping, and distance makes the remaining escape mean standing up. Once you're standing up, the mission has done most of its work. If you're choosing a mission, here's how they rank on how hard they are to fake.

What Android allows, and what it doesn't

Older alarm apps closed the power menu by sending a system broadcast that told Android to dismiss its dialogs. Android 12 took that away. In Google's own words, "Apps can't close system dialogs": the ACTION_CLOSE_SYSTEM_DIALOGS action is deprecated, and an app targeting Android 12 or later that tries it gets a SecurityException.

That is why the feature quietly disappeared from some apps. Alarmy's own help centre has a page titled "Prevent phone turn-off feature is gone since Android 12".

What Android 12 left open is the accessibility service. An app with it switched on can still perform system actions like Back and Home, which close the power menu. It is a sensitive permission, which is why a well-behaved app asks for it with a full explanation first.

What no app can touch is the forced restart. Holding the power button, or power plus volume depending on the phone, until it reboots happens below the level any app runs at. No alarm app can block it, and one that claims to is overstating things. The guard can only act on what appears on screen, and a forced restart never shows anything.

Beyond Alarm

Beyond Alarm does this part for you: the alarm will not switch off until you have actually moved, and the apps you pick stay locked afterwards.

How we close the power menu

This is the part only we can show you, because it's our code.

While an alarm rings, Beyond Alarm's accessibility service looks for a power menu two ways. It checks the window's system class name, and it checks the words on screen: "Power off", "Restart", "Shut down". The second check exists because some manufacturers' menus don't match any known class name; vivo's was the one that slipped through before we added it.

When it finds one, it sends Back, then Home, then brings the alarm back to the front. It repeats that at 120 and 350 milliseconds, because some phones re-show the menu a beat after it is dismissed. It also sweeps for a menu every 220 milliseconds on its own, so a second press straight after the first is caught too.

The same service sends you back to the alarm if you press Home or open another app while it rings. The notification shade is left readable on purpose. And the alarm plays on Android's alarm channel, which silent mode doesn't mute.

If the phone restarts anyway

Here is exactly what Beyond Alarm does after a restart.

A ring that the restart cut off does not come back. Switching the phone off mid-ring is your decision to stop that alarm, and an old alarm going off at a surprise time later is worse. That's why the power-off guard works so hard to stop you getting there.

What does survive is every future alarm. They are re-armed as the phone boots, before you unlock it, so a phone that restarted at 8:20 and was left locked still rings at 8:30. One of our Play reviewers noticed exactly that: "The alarm works even if you restarted your phone and didn't unlock it." More on why many apps fail there is in alarm not ringing after a restart.

That is why distance matters. If a forced restart is your habit, Beyond Alarm plus a charger across the room is the combination that holds.

Set it up in two minutes

1. Install Beyond Alarm and give your alarm a mission. The loophole only matters once the alarm is hard to dismiss any other way.
2. Switch on its accessibility service when asked, and read what it says it does with it. In Beyond Alarm that is Settings → Protection → Prevent power-off.
3. Turn on Prevent app uninstall in the same section.
4. Put the phone where you have to stand up to reach it. A charger across the room is enough.
5. Test it once while you're awake: set an alarm two minutes ahead, let it ring, and press the power button. The menu should vanish before you can tap it.
6. Check your phone's battery settings too, so the alarm isn't killed in the night. The manufacturer-specific fixes are here.

If you're coming from Alarmy specifically, here are the alternatives and what each one is better at, and a straight comparison of the two.