Here's why Google Play Music needs an alarm feature

Here's why Google Play Music needs an alarm feature

Recently, Google Play Music added a sleep timer to its popular app at long last. If you fall asleep to music, congratulations — our phone doesn't have to run your lullaby all night! It's a wonderful addition to the app, one that brings two questions to my mind: where's a Material Dark theme so we aren't blinded listening before bed, and where's an alarm feature so we can wake up to music, too?

They're designed to startle you, you learn to ignore them after a while, and they mostly sound terrible. Why would you wake up to one of those when you could wake up to music? Ever since I learned I could wake up to CDs as a little, music-loving girl, I've made it a point to wake up to some of my awesome tunes. I used a CD alarm clock, then an iPod alarm clock, and then I came to Android… and I had to find something else.

Alarms suck. Google Play Music is exactly what you need to make them better.

Faults and all — and there are faults aplenty — I love Google Play Music, but it wasn't accessible as my morning alarm. So I tried traditional alarms, and I tried the DoubleTwist alarm clock, but nothing ever seemed to click. Then I discovered Tasker. Tasker had the ability to trigger my current Google Play Music queue, giving me back the wake-up routine I had so missed since I switched to the service. I'm not gonna deny the tears I shed when testing the profile and finding it worked.

But why couldn't I do it on Google Play Music in the first place?

Well, Google Play Music tracks aren't accessible to any other apps, so unlike iPhones, we can't take songs from Google Play Music and make them alarms or ringtones directly. So that means that in order to use Google Play Music as an alarm clock, we either need an alarm function built right into the app, which I've wanted since day one, or we have to turn to some third-party hackery.

While Tasker has gotten me by for the last few years, I'm ready for a first-party solution. Millions of people wake up to music, and if Google Play Music allowed them to wake up to their app, those people could make Google Play Music a part of their daily routine. Those people would also be more likely to buy and keep All Access.

No one should understand better how important music is than a music service, and they should strive to make sure their music is what its users count on every moment of the day, whether they're drifting off to dreamland, or being drawn back to the waking world. Google Play Music needs an alarm function.

They also need a dark theme to go with it!