Questions, answered.

Yes. Because the app is running during your trip, it plays a real alarm on your media volume rather than sending a notification. The media channel ignores the silent switch and Focus, which is the same reason a video keeps its sound when your phone is muted.

That is a categorical difference from a notification, not a matter of degree. No app can raise your phone above its hardware volume ceiling, and Stopzone does not claim to.

No. Once your stop is saved, everything runs on the phone. There are zero network calls between the moment you tap Start and the moment the alarm rings. GPS is a receiver, not a connection, so it keeps working with no bars and in aeroplane mode.

Barely. Stopzone is built to stay under about 5% for a forty-minute trip. It slows its GPS checks while you are far from your stop and speeds them up as you close in, so the expensive, high-accuracy sampling only happens during the few minutes it actually matters.

Mostly. GPS does not reach through deep tunnels, so underground sections lose position. Stopzone handles this two ways: it keeps estimating from your last known speed and heading, and it schedules a backup alarm the moment you tap Start, which fires on time whether or not the signal returns.

On overground and elevated lines, and on buses, trams and mainline trains, position is continuous and the zone triggers exactly as expected.

It depends on your iPhone. On iOS 26 and later, Stopzone arms a system alarm through AlarmKit when your session starts, so a force-quit still ends in an alarm. On iOS 17 through 25 the session needs the app alive, and the session screen says so rather than quietly failing.

Never. There is no email, no login, no signup and no password, on any screen, at any point. Support works through a short ID shown in Settings rather than an identity. Nothing about you is stored anywhere that could be linked back to a person.

Nowhere. Every distance calculation happens on your device. Your stops, their coordinates, your sessions and your history never leave the phone. The only thing our servers hold is whether a subscription is active, which is a yes or a no with no location attached to it.

Yes, on iOS 17 and up. The full experience is identical on every supported version: the loud alarm through Silent mode, the earphone stage, and the whole escalating wake sequence. iPhones on iOS 26 and later add one extra safety net, for the case where the app is force-quit mid-trip.

Yes, and that is the point. The first stage of the wake sequence goes to your earphones deliberately, so you are woken without the rest of the carriage hearing anything. Only if you do not respond does the alarm escalate to the phone's own speaker.

All of them. Stopzone measures the straight-line distance between your phone and a point you chose. It does not read timetables, routes or vehicle data, so it has no concept of which kind of vehicle you are in. That also means it works on a ferry, in a car, or on a bike.

Everywhere. There is no transit database to be missing from. You pin a point anywhere on Earth and the app measures how far you are from it, which makes it most useful precisely where you know the route least. Travel mode widens the default zone for exactly that case.

Because a missed stop is expensive. One overshot stop costs a taxi home or an hour of your evening. Beyond that, a reliable alarm changes what a commute is for: instead of fighting to stay awake, you can deliberately sleep, and the app counts the minutes you get back so you can see whether that trade is working.

Early, by design. You choose the zone yourself, anywhere from 300 m to 5 km, and the alarm fires when you enter it. The app deliberately errs early: 200 m early is invisible, and 800 m late is the next stop. It never predicts a time, because distance to a fixed point is exact and a prediction is not.