The Idea
In June 2025, Apple gave away the alarm.
For eighteen years the Clock app was the only software on an iPhone allowed to scream through Silent mode and Focus. Everything else was a workaround. Looping audio files, notification tricks, apps that worked fine for a month and then quietly failed on the one morning that mattered. Millions of people paid for them anyway, because the alternative was oversleeping.
Jake Glacer read the WWDC release notes and saw what they actually said. AlarmKit, shipping in iOS 26, meant any third-party app could fire a real alarm. Full screen. Through Silent. Through Sleep Focus. Identical permissions to Apple's own. Every incumbent in the category had been built on sand, and the tide was coming in on all of them at the same moment.
He did not invent anything. He took the oldest idea in the category, the alarm you cannot switch off until you complete a task, and rebuilt it on plumbing that actually worked. Then he shipped it the same month iOS 26 landed. This was the beginning of Erly.
The Execution
- 2021: The category was already proven. Alarmy, the Korean mission-alarm app, had passed 65 million downloads and reported $11.21M in revenue with a 292% three-year growth rate, all built on workarounds. Demand was never the question.
- June 2025: Apple announced AlarmKit at WWDC, handing developers the same alert permissions as the Clock app for the first time: Lock Screen, Dynamic Island, Apple Watch, and audio that bypasses Silent and Focus. Developers noticed the framework was barebones. Glacer noticed it was enough.
- September 2025: Erly launched on the App Store, two weeks before iOS 26 shipped. One screen, one job: alarms that will not turn off until you complete a mission, plus a streak counter and a wake-up time that locks four hours before bed so your 6am self cannot renegotiate.
- Autumn 2025: He shipped like a maniac. The version history runs from 1.2.12 in October 2025 to 1.2.43 by July 2026, roughly a release a week for ten months straight, with marketing running from day one rather than after launch.
- January 2026: Four months in, Erly cleared $50K/month, driven by organic short-form video rather than paid acquisition. Glacer's framing to Starter Story was blunt: watch for API changes, because a slew of apps always ships when a platform opens something up.
- Spring 2026: The friction arrived. Erly is free to download, then paywalls after a three-day trial, with in-app purchases running up to $39.99. Reviews split hard: users love the missions, and a vocal chunk call the paywall misleading for what is, structurally, an alarm clock. The Android build drew separate complaints about alarms misfiring.
- Today: Erly sits at 4.8 stars from 16,000 ratings and ranks inside the top 200 free Health & Fitness apps in the US, with 250K+ downloads logged. Glacier Labs has since shipped a second app, Lymphi, a facial massage tracker. Same playbook, different niche.
- July 2026: The Starter Story episode went out and Glacer's own summary went semi-viral: iOS 26 opened a rare window, and every alarm app before it was broken.
The lesson?
Glacer did not win on originality. Alarmy had the identical idea and built a 65-million-download business on it years earlier, using duct tape. He won because he was reading Apple's documentation while everyone else was hunting for an idea nobody had ever had. When a platform changes its rules, every incumbent's moat drains at once, and for a few months the category is scored on execution speed instead of history. That window closes. Erly's own advantage is now available to anyone who reads the same docs. Don't look for an idea nobody's had. Look for an old idea sitting on new plumbing, and get there in the first ninety days.