A whistle stop is a station the train only stops at if you ask in advance.

And the conductor blows the whistle before the stop, not at it, so the passenger knows it is coming.

That is the whole product, in a word someone invented for the railroads a century and a half ago. The train does not stop on its own and it does not stop for everyone. It stops because you asked for it, in advance, which is exactly what every alarm in this app is. And the whistle sounds first, which is the preminder.

The metaphor keeps going further than it has any right to. The ADHD experience gets described, often, as being on a train you cannot get off. The conductor cannot stop the train either. But he knows where you are, and he tells you when your stop is coming.

Why there is a conductor and not a mascot

He is a recognizable adult doing a job. Not cute, not a cheerleader, and not disappointed in you. His register is already the right one: next stop, Medford, doors open on the right. Plain, factual, no encouragement, no editorialising. A conductor announces the stop. He does not announce that somebody missed theirs.

That turned out to matter more than a character choice usually does, because the hardest rule in this app is that nothing in it is ever allowed to express disappointment. There is no version of this character who could.

Where the app came from

Brad Thompson is the founder of Openroad Apps LLC, an independent app studio in Portland, Oregon. He built Whistlestop after watching the same thing happen to every alarm he set: it worked for two weeks, then stopped registering at all. Every app built to fix that attacks it with friction, making the alarm harder to switch off. Whistlestop attacks it with novelty instead, which is the thing the brain is actually reacting to.

The research all points one way. Habituation is a response to repetition, so the answer is to remove the repetition rather than to make the alarm harder to switch off. Every app on the market had taken the other road, and the ones that had a random sound option had it buried inside a missions app built for oversleepers.

Who builds it

Whistlestop is made by Openroad Apps LLC, an independent app studio in Portland, OR. It is a small operation, which is the reason for several decisions you can see from the outside: there is no server, no account and no subscription, because the app does not need any of them and every one of them is a thing that can break while somebody is relying on an alarm.