Dawn Chorus Reviews

I really love waking-up to the bird sounds and really wish DawnChorus was more practical to use. It is very hard to snooze this alarm and you cannot do it from your lock screen. It also does not allow you to change the snooze time. When my alarm goes off it takes a while for the snooze option to show-up. It would be some much better if you could turn the alarm off or snooze it with the side buttons on the phone, or if it allowed you to tap a button on the lock screen to snooze or turn off the alarm (like the apple clock allows you to do). It would also be very helpful if you could hear the alarm while your phone is on silent (again, like the apple clock). I have my work email on my phone and I hate having to hear my email notifications throughout the night due to not being able to put my phone on silent. The developer states the new version allows you to hear this on silent, but DawnChorus specially tells you to turn the silent feature off to hear the alarm. I tested the alarm with my phone on silent as well and it only vibrates. You cannot hear the alarm. I hope an upgrade is coming soon, because I really want to keep using DawnChorus, but it is just too cumbersome to use everyday. Please fix!

It is a great idea for a pleasant and soothing wake up alarm, but a dawn chorus it isn’t.
Rather than listening to a morning chorus of local birds, you’re required to select five birds (out of ten) that play sequentially as part of the alarm. Once a bird sings a couple stanzas, the next bird sings until you’ve heard all five. Sorta OK, but then what really wakes you is the notifications you start to receive stating the first bird is wondering whether you are awake (what?) ... and then a notification from the next bird, and so on until there are 14 notifications on your phone. Really not OK.
The is no snooze feature ... don’t really need one since the birds all play and are then done.
DawnChorus requires the phone to be plugged into power (dumb), requires your notifications are turned on (I don’t want notifications from my alarm), and the do not disturb feature is disabled (not really OK).
I deleted DawnChorus since it was a bit too invasive and clunky and will try it again after it is more user friendly.

I stumbled upon DawnChorus while setting up my new iPhone 8 Plus (I briefly forgot my Apple ID so logged in to DawnChorus Store to get it and saw this beauty.) Instantly downloaded it and was super impressed with how pretty DawnChorus is as well as the clarity of the songs from the birds. Unfortunately I will not be able to use DawnChorus until it integrates a little better with the lock screen. Light pollution is not my friend nor anyone’s really!

Please please develop DawnChorus further more and give it some meat to go with the potatoes, I would rather wake to the sounds of nature than another alarm and just like nature we need total darkness apart from the night sky.

Amazing work so far! Keep going, keep developing! I’m only giving the 2 star in hopes you see this and change the need for lock to be on. Otherwise I would say you’re sitting at a 3.5 Star. The small tweaks would make me a raving fan.

The bird songs are great and I prefer waking up to a gentler alarm that is less likely to wake up other family nearby who are within earshot. Also our cat and parrot really respond to the sounds. It gets the parrot to stop screaming. Two issues are that you have to disable the “do not disturb” or reschedule so that you can hear the alarm. Also, I have difficulty unlocking my screen in the early (dark) morning as the iPhone cannot see my face. After entering my passcode, I have to go directly to DawnChorus to turn the alarm switch to off. This morning, I did that, switched off the alarm and the bird sounds were still going! Had to switch to silent mode briefly to make it stop. So yes, there are some usability issues with iPhone 11.

DawnChorus is fabulous I have to get up early for school and DawnChorus is perfect. I have an alarm clock but it’s the most annoying thing, I found DawnChorus and it was awesome. It wakes you up without being overly annoying and can remind you of other things too. The visuals are stunning and DawnChorus tells you the birds that make the calls you are hearing and shows you what they look like. In the end DawnChorus is incredible I have deleted it many times to make space on my little iPod but I always come back and reinstall it in the end.

I don’t understand why DawnChorus isn’t rated 5 stars by everyone. For me, this product brings substantial joy to my every day. I live a complicated life. I am the founder of a startup. I’ve had cancer multiple times. Sleep is elusive. On nights when I’ve had too little, at least I get to wake up to the semblance of nature. And I learn about our feathered brethren among the way. I really want to thank the developers of DawnChorus, the artists involved, and the Carnegie Museum for funding it. You did a great job and should be proud of your work. Well done.

I downloaded DawnChorus because i was sick of that ugly beeping alarm on the iphone alarm app. When I opened DawnChorus I was amazed at how you could customize different bird song alarms with different birds. One issue though, about after a month of using the same bird song I began to notice when I would walk outside I would get that weird jolt like when you hear your alarm outside of you using it as an alarm. The real bird calls were giving me that sort of negative ASMR. Other than that it’s great.

I love DawnChorus. The birds sound so lovely and realistic. It is so pleasant to wake to. I’m very happy with the way it starts with one bird and builds another on top. I’m glad to be able to customize each alarm with different birds. My only complaint is that is has to be reset everyday. I wish it could be set to automatically repeat. I would like to have one for Monday-Friday, a different one for Sunday and perhaps a different one to go off every afternoon as a reminder. If this feature was added it would be amazing!

I love the sounds of birds and it was a very pleasant way to wake up ... for a few days, maybe even a couple of weeks. The problem is, it trains your brain to wake to the sounds of the dawn chorus, which in real life happens at around 5am (or earlier) every day. If you want to start waking up at 5am to the sounds of every robin, warbler and other feathered Pavarotti in your neighborhood, great! Personally I find it frustrating to miss out on my last precious hour of sleep every day and I wish I’d never started using DawnChorus.

Let’s start with the big positive: the birdsong recordings in DawnChorus are stellar. If you’re really into waking up to birds, this is definitely the best option out there.

The negative? There’s a lot of basic functionality lacking in DawnChorus. No recurring alarm settings, no customizable snooze, and no way to integrate the many different birdsong recordings into an alarm that gradually increases in volume/intensity (this is my pet peeve- what I really want from DawnChorus is an alarm which starts with a single bird and gradually builds to a bird-based cacophony over the next half hour).

Absolutely love hearing the sounds of birds in the morning that I usually hear at home! It’s a great way to start the morning in a good mood, especially during a winter slump. I was so happy when I realized that I now get the CUTEST animal stickers for my text messages too! Amazing illustrations and I love that I can create different symphonies of bird calls. Thank you for making DawnChorus and I am recommending it to all my my friends!!! 😍

Such a simple and beautiful app. However, so simple that it could use some basic additional functions—namely to turn on even if the phone is turned to silent mode. My phone is almost always on silent at night so I don’t get awoken by alerts. Granted, I could adjust this in my settings, but it would be great if I didn’t have to.

I do have a couple requests for a red-winged blackbird and a robin sound be added. :)

To start - I have to leave my phone on at night for emergency calls, so I don't have the problem other users are reporting with the phone lock. It would be nice to set the alarm for M-F and not have to reset it every night, but that's livable. I use this as a backup alarm to my clock (yes, I still have one of those) and change the 5 birds in the Chorus now and then. The songs are so good (a) they wake up my cat and (b) the blue jays OUTSIDE start yelling at the blue jays in DawnChorus !

I really like the customizable bird sounds. They all sound really good. Although I don’t like how each bird slowly moves in over fifteen minutes. I just want it to wake me up, and I can’t set which day for it to go off like all the other alarm clock apps I’ve seen. Also for some reason, I must of tapped something that made a certain bird chirp go on and on, without a way to stop whenever I’m in DawnChorus . Other then that, it’s great.

Best part of DawnChorus is putting bird songs together. You can choose and select. However there are many problems with application. Cannot silence your phone at night because the alarm will not turn on. Even with directions for silenced phone, developer has you plug phone in, leave app open, and unlocked it does not work. The alarm only turns on when you have DawnChorus opened on an unlocked phone. Please find a way to update DawnChorus to work like other alarms!