Welcome to this edition of SSPAI Review. You can use the table of contents to quickly jump to the sections you’re interested in. If you’ve discovered other interesting apps or topics worth paying attention to, feel free to join the discussion in the comments.

New Apps Worth Paying Attention To

While SSPAI has long been dedicated to discovering and introducing high-quality apps across platforms, there are still many excellent apps—outstanding in design, functionality, interaction, and overall experience—that we haven’t yet covered. They might be long-standing apps or newly released ones, and we’ll introduce them to you here.

Awake: A New App From a Veteran Developer—You Must Complete Tasks to Turn Off the Alarm

• Platform: iOS, iPadOS
• Keywords: Smart alarm clock, daily briefing

@ElijahLee: Awake is a smart alarm clock app designed to make sure you actually wake up—by requiring you to complete tasks before you can turn the alarm off. It comes from the developer of the well-known scheduling app Structured. Awake is more than just a simple alarm clock; it’s a personalized morning assistant.

Getting started with Awake is very straightforward. When you first open the app, a short and simple onboarding flow teaches you how to use it to wake up. In the tutorial, you’re required to rotate your iPhone three full circles before moving on to the next step—this perfectly reflects Awake’s design philosophy: you must complete a task to dismiss the alarm. In the following steps, you configure your wake-up time, bedtime, and alarm cycle in just three steps to finish setting up the alarm. Thanks to iOS AlarmKit, alarms set via Awake have system-level priority and cannot be disabled.

Awake’s interface is clean and minimal. The app displays your upcoming bedtime, sleep, and wake-up times in a timeline (Schedules) view for the next few days, which you can browse by swiping up or down. The most creative feature is the set of tasks (Missions) required to turn off the alarm. When the alarm goes off, you can’t simply swipe it away—you have to complete a task. Awake offers two free tasks: rotating your iPhone and solving math problems. It also supports tasks via third-party apps such as the puzzle app Art of Fauna and the language-learning app Lengo. With a paid subscription, you can unlock additional tasks like turning on room lights, scanning a QR code, or walking a few steps. These tasks help activate your brain and shake off drowsiness more effectively.

The Morning Briefing feature displays a short summary after you dismiss the alarm, helping you start the day more prepared. You can customize the briefing content yourself; currently supported items include the current weather, calendar events, Structured tasks, and one sec Pomodoro sessions, with future plans for sleep analysis, daily podcasts, and more. This feature feels like a morning stand-up meeting—shifting you from passively waking up to actively planning your day.

You can download Awake for free from the App Store. Most features are available at no cost, while a paid subscription unlocks all alarm-dismiss tasks, all briefing integrations, all alarm sounds, support for multiple timelines, and more. Pricing is RMB 5.75 per month (early-bird price RMB 3.99/month), RMB 22 per year (early-bird price RMB 15.8/year), or a one-time purchase of RMB 156.

Alyx: Scientifically Tracking Caffeine, Letting Coffee and Health Coexist in Harmony

• Platform: iOS
• Keywords: Caffeine

@Vanilla: I think many coffee lovers like myself have had concerns like these: Did I drink too much coffee today? Will that afternoon cup affect my sleep quality at night? If you share these worries, you might want to try an app called Caffeine Tracker: Alyx. It lets you log coffee intake in multiple ways and automatically calculates caffeine content, then uses intake time and sleep time to estimate how much caffeine remains in your system—helping you understand, in real time, how caffeine is affecting your body. Compared with the feature list itself, I’m even more interested in Alyx’s UI interactions and its use of AI.

Let’s start with how you log coffee. Alyx supports two main ways to add new records.

The first is to tap the “+” button in the bottom-right corner of the app. You can quickly log a drink using presets or by creating your own caffeinated beverages. Alyx comes with a rich set of built-in templates—Espresso, Espresso-Based, Brewed Coffee, Cold Coffee, Instant Coffee, Tea, Energy Drink, Soda, and more—covering pretty much all the caffeinated drinks you’re likely to encounter in daily life.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for among the templates, you can create a custom drink. When doing so, you can either manually enter the caffeine content or let AI automatically identify it for you. In addition to drink templates, you can also directly input a caffeine amount, or type in a description and let Apple Intelligence analyze the caffeine content from text. Before logging, you’ll also need to specify the exact date and time of intake.

The second method leverages Apple Intelligence’s Visual Lookup API, allowing you to add caffeine intake simply by taking a photo. Long-press the camera button on the right side of the iPhone to bring up the Visual Lookup capture interface. Take a photo of the drink, tap the “Search” button in the bottom-right corner, switch to the “Alyx” tab, and you’ll see Alyx automatically identify the beverage and its caffeine content. Choose the appropriate option, and it’s added to Alyx automatically.

Beyond these two core input methods, Alyx also integrates with system features like Siri Shortcuts, widgets, and action buttons, making it easy to trigger logging in ways that fit different users’ habits and preferences.

Alyx offers a variety of charts, including yearly intake, weekly intake, daily intake, caffeine metabolism curves, and sleep correlations, helping you understand how coffee impacts your health. It also includes an AI-powered sleep prediction feature that provides real-time analysis based on caffeine intake, intake timing, and sleep schedules.

At the very bottom of the main screen, there’s also an “Honors Board,” showing the highest caffeine intake across different time spans—monthly, weekly, daily, or per single intake. In the settings, you can change the theme colors, manage your drink library, and adjust parameters like sleep time and daily caffeine limits.

As a caffeine tracking and analysis app, Alyx really stands out in both UI interaction design and feature depth. For coffee enthusiasts—or anyone reliant on caffeine—it’s an excellent health management tool. That said, it’s worth noting that Alyx’s AI sleep analysis should be treated as a reference only. When I fed the same scenario to Gemini 3.0 Pro, I got completely different results.

Alyx is free to download from the App Store, but a subscription is required to unlock features in the Caffeine Club, such as adding custom drinks, viewing more charts and widgets, and accessing sleep analysis. Pricing is $1.99 per month or $9.99 per year.

GitHub Store: A One-Stop Hub for Discovering Open-Source Projects

• Platform: Android / Windows / macOS / Linux
• Keywords: Open-source projects

@BigBigBigK: If you’re looking for free and open-source app projects, what could possibly beat GitHub? In the past, I could only learn about great GitHub projects through social media and similar channels. That changed a few days ago when I discovered an app called GitHub Store. It brings together nearly all application projects on GitHub—mobile and desktop alike—so you can tap into GitHub’s virtually endless resources through a single app.

GitHub Store itself is a cross-platform client written in Kotlin, with a UI fully built around the Material 3 design language. On Android, it also supports dynamic color theming. In terms of functionality, GitHub Store uses GitHub’s official search API to fetch project information across the entire site, then filters repositories based on whether they have installable release assets, supported platforms, version tags, and more. It also pulls in README.md files and statistics, making it easy for users to review each project.

The Trending and New tabs in GitHub Store only surface apps relevant to the current platform you’re using. The search function, however, has no such restrictions—you can even search for macOS or Windows apps while using the Android version.

The desktop version of GitHub Store is relatively more basic, while the Android version offers richer features. For example, it can automatically update installed apps (though for now it only tracks apps installed via GitHub Store itself), or directly add repositories to Obtainium for more granular installation management. It can also integrate with AppManager, a high-privilege tool, to manage and control app behavior.

One thing to note is that GitHub Store will prompt you to log in after a few uses. By linking to GitHub through a third-party app and using a personal token, you can lift API rate limits. GitHub Store supports Android, Windows, and Linux, and can be downloaded for free from GitHub.

Traffic Light: A More Beautiful Way to Track Your Data Usage

• Platform: Android
• Keywords: Data usage tracking

@Peggy_: I’m not sure what kind of mobile plan everyone is on these days, but since I’ve long had Wi-Fi at home and at school, I don’t use much mobile data. To cut costs, I downgraded to a cheaper plan—and from then on, I started rationing my data whenever I was out. Traffic Light is a beautifully designed data usage tracking app, and its biggest strength is simply how good it looks.

To get Traffic Light to accurately track your data usage, you’ll need to grant the necessary permissions in advance—such as disabling battery optimization to prevent the system from killing it in the background, and granting usage access so it can collect data more precisely. Once authorized, you can clearly see your Wi-Fi usage and mobile data usage at a glance.

On its statistics pages, Traffic Light shows data usage for the current day and week. Wi-Fi and mobile data are displayed in different colored blocks, and the vertical axis of the chart includes a horizontal reference line that adjusts based on your usage, making it easy to quickly gauge overall consumption. If you want to see detailed daily usage, just tap the history statistics page in the center of the main screen.

When it comes to design, nearly every button in Traffic Light’s interface is interactive. From the button used to change themes to each small icon on the statistics pages, tapping them triggers haptic feedback and icon animations, which revert on a second tap. These touches make what would otherwise be a dull data-tracking tool feel lively and fun.

Beyond usage statistics, you can also grant notification permissions to have Traffic Light display current network speed and real-time data usage. Overall, while its functionality isn’t irreplaceable, its polished design and attention to detail make it a pleasant app to keep on your phone and play around with from time to time.

You can download and try Traffic Light via F-Droid. The app is open-source and completely free.

App Updates You Shouldn’t Miss

Beyond brand-new apps, many familiar faces on the App Store are constantly iterating and updating, adding more interesting and practical features. SSPAI aims to help you filter through the app updates worth paying attention to, so you can quickly catch up on the latest developments from apps and their developers.

Cuto 3.1: Set Curated Live Wallpapers on iPhone

• Platform: iOS / Android
• Keywords: Live wallpapers

@化学心情下2: Cuto has long been a wallpaper app I keep installed on both iPhone and Android, largely because its wallpapers are handpicked and consistently high in quality. The app recently released version 3.1, introducing live wallpaper support, allowing your selected wallpapers to come to life when the screen lights up.

The principle behind live wallpapers is actually quite simple. iOS already allows users to set Live Photos as lock screen wallpapers, and Cuto’s live wallpapers are essentially Live Photos. All you need to do is download these Live Photos and set them as wallpapers in the system to see the animated effect.

Open Cuto’s “Live Wallpapers” collection, or look for wallpapers marked with a Live icon in the top-left corner. Find and download a live wallpaper, then open its preview page and tap the play button in the bottom-left corner to preview the animation. If you’re satisfied, tap the download button in the bottom-right corner to save the wallpaper to your system photo library.

Next, go to the “Wallpaper” section in iOS Settings, select the live wallpaper you just downloaded, and manually set it as your lock screen wallpaper. On the settings page, tap the Live icon to enable the animation, and your live wallpaper setup will be complete.

Due to iOS system limitations, the animation effect only plays for a few seconds when the screen lights up. Additionally, since iOS does not provide an API for configuring live wallpapers, there’s no way to automate the process with Shortcuts—you’ll need to set them manually.

According to the developers, future updates to Cuto will support user-created live wallpapers, such as a “video to Live Photo” feature that lets you convert videos into lock screen live wallpapers with one tap. Live wallpaper support for the Android version is also in development. Compared with iOS, Android imposes fewer restrictions, allowing for higher image quality and smoother animations.

Cuto’s live wallpaper feature requires a subscription to download. You can visit the official website to download Cuto for your platform of choice.

Lorqa Update: Floating Real-Time Subtitles With Custom Model Support

• Platform: macOS
• Keywords: AI

@Snow: Lorqa is a local AI translation app for macOS. In last week’s 1.3.3 update, it added support for using on-device AI engines to transcribe audio or video currently playing on the system in real time, automatically generating corresponding subtitles and translations. These subtitles can appear as floating overlays anywhere on the screen, significantly lowering the barrier to watching content without subtitles.

Using Lorqa’s real-time subtitles is very straightforward. On first use, follow the prompts to grant “Screen Recording & System Audio” permissions. After that, simply switch to the “Real-Time Subtitles” page, select a recognition model and the target translation language, and enable real-time translation. The recognized subtitles and translated text appear as long-form text in the app window. Once translation is complete, you can export the results as .txt or .md files for further processing.

Lorqa also offers floating subtitle overlays. Just click the “Floating Subtitles” button in the bottom-right corner to enable them. The overlay supports customization of font size, background opacity, original and translated text colors, and maximum width. Because Lorqa relies on system audio permissions, its use cases aren’t limited to local video translation—music, podcasts, online videos, video calls, and online meetings can all be assisted with Lorqa.

I describe it as “assisted translation” because, at present, Lorqa’s recognition speed and translation accuracy aren’t sufficient to fully stand on their own. It typically needs nearly two seconds to complete segmentation and translation. For English documentaries with clear pronunciation, moderate pacing, and more formal language, this delay doesn’t significantly impact comprehension. But in film and TV scenarios, even with the “Aggressive” transcription mode introduced in version 1.3.6, Lorqa struggles to segment speech clearly in fast, overlapping dialogue—and segmentation errors further reduce translation accuracy.

In addition to an “English Recognition Model,” Lorqa also includes a “Multilingual Recognition Model” supporting 25 languages, including French, German, and Bulgarian. However, because you can’t manually specify the language, speech recognition largely depends on luck. When I tried using it to recognize the Slovenian song Sanremo Memory, it alternated between translating into English and Russian—hard to call it accurate; it was more like a complete case of talking past each other.

Since I’m using an M1 MacBook Air, with relatively limited local compute power, that may also affect responsiveness to some extent. In the latest 1.3.6 version, Lorqa has opened up model configuration for Ollama and LM Studio. If you’ve deployed third-party models that are better at translation, you can try connecting them for potentially better results.

Lorqa uses a “free + in-app purchase” model. You can subscribe for RMB 38 per year or make a one-time purchase for RMB 68. The annual subscription includes a 7-day trial, so it’s recommended to try it before deciding whether to pay.

You can download Lorqa for free from the App Store.

App Brief

The animation editing and creation app Procreate Dreams released a major 2.0 update, adding support for selection and transformation, GIFs, advanced export options, and more.