Most alarm apps buzz before every event the same way. Peal reads your calendar and sizes each alarm to the kind of event it is. A flight gets you moving early, earlier still if it's international. A lunch across town becomes a leave-by timed to the driving traffic. A video call just gets a quiet heads-up, since you're not going anywhere.
The best alarm is the one you never had to remember to set.
Apple's Clock is a fine alarm. It just waits for you to decide everything: what to set, when, and to remember to do it at all. Peal starts from your calendar instead. It looks at what's coming, works out what kind of event each one is, and offers an alarm that fits. Some of these are suggestions you tap to accept; some, like leave-by reminders, you switch on once and let run. Either way, nothing happens until you choose it.
This is the part other alarm apps skip. Peal tells a flight from an in-person meeting from a video call from a birthday from a weekly standup, and treats each one differently. A flight gets a bigger head start, bigger still if it's international. An in-person meeting gets a leave-by alarm; a video call doesn't, because you aren't going anywhere. A birthday turns into a friendly morning nudge instead of a midnight buzz. A daily standup collapses to one alarm, not fourteen.
For anywhere you actually have to travel, Peal sets a leave-by alarm from the driving time when you'll be on the road, using current and predicted traffic from Apple Maps. Flights add an arrive-early buffer. You choose how you're getting there; driving is where the live traffic applies.
Because Peal understands how your reminders relate, it keeps them in check. Set a leave-by and it drops the redundant "starting now" buzz. A weekly meeting is one alarm, not a fresh one every week. Two things at once get staggered a minute apart instead of firing on top of each other.
Tap the mic and say the alarm out loud, recurrence and all: "every third Thursday, team lunch." Peal works it out on your phone, with the on-device model on an iPhone that has Apple Intelligence, and hands you a filled-in alarm to confirm. Nothing is sent off your device.
Some reminders aren't about the clock. Peal can ring when you reach somewhere or leave it: grab the dry cleaning on the way home, send a text when you land. The place is watched on your phone, never on a server, and you can keep up to twenty of them.
Every other Tuesday. The fifteenth of the month. The third Thursday. The last day of the month. Every three months. Yearly. Peal schedules the patterns the built-in Clock leaves out, and shows you the plan in plain words before you save it.
Peal runs on Apple's AlarmKit, the same machinery behind the built-in Clock, so an alarm sounds at full volume through Silent, Do Not Disturb, and Focus, with a full-screen alert and Apple Watch support. On iOS 26 that isn't special anymore; it's just what a real alarm should do. The floor, not the pitch.
Peal has no login and no backend; there's nothing on a server because there is no server. Your alarms live on your iPhone and sync through your own iCloud if you want them to. Every feature is free, with no ads, no data collected, and no alarm locked behind a paywall.
The built-in alarm assumes you already know what to set, and that you'll remember to set it. For a lot of people that assumption fails: someone running on too little sleep, someone whose week never looks the same twice, someone with ADHD who leans on alarms to hold the things working memory keeps dropping.
Peal does some of that remembering for you. It looks at the day you actually have and offers the alarms it implies, so keeping your life on the rails doesn't depend on perfectly planning it the night before. Build for the people the default leaves out, and it usually turns out better for everyone too.
Peal is live on the App Store, built for iOS 26 and above. Get it on the App Store.
Peal has no servers, so nothing it uses ever leaves your phone or reaches us. Here is the full inventory of the data Peal can work with—each piece something you choose whether to grant—and where it goes.
Support, feedback, and feature requests—benjamin@forwardcompatible.org. A human reads every message.