Snap Me Up

Dragging your sleepy self out of bed every morning is hard — really, really hard. If you're anything like me, you hit snooze on your phone's alarm a few times, and by the time you're actually physically out of bed, you're still groggy and grumpy. But with Snap Me Up, a new alarm app for Android that requires you take a selfie in order to cease its sound, the game might just be changed. After all, selfies are the token activity of our time, catering to both our inability to disconnect from technology and a level of narcissism. Snap Me Up has an automatic facial detector, meaning that you technically don’t even have to press a button. All you need to do is demonstrate to the app that you’re awake enough to hold it in front of your face and it’ll trust that you’re up. 

To set a new alarm, you just tap the red + button and select a time and mode – if you don’t want the selfie option switched on, you can just set an alarm as normal and you’ll wake up to a slow slideshow of images stored on your phone. There’s also a nap timer, for duration of five minutes or longer.

One fun aspect of the app is that it saves the selfies that you take in an album it calls “My Sleepy Snaps,” review of which may either cause extreme depression or extreme laughter. 

The only thing I find annoying about the app is the Google ads on the bottom of your Sleepy Snaps album; sometimes, they open in full screen, too.