- Users are reporting issues with the iPhone’s built-in alarm feature
- A Reddit thread recounts that some users’ alarms are going off late, with others not going off at all
- We’ve reached out to Apple for comment, but haven’t received a response yet
iPhone users are reporting abnormal behavior from their phones’ built-in alarm feature, with some alarms sounding off hours after the scheduled time and others not going off at all.
A Reddit post shared to r/iphone by user bryanlolwut (via Android Authority) showing an iPhone alarm set for 10:30am actually going off at 12:42pm sparked a thread in which dozens of users have shared similar experiences.
Some users noted that this has been a continuous problem – KnowingFalcon, for instance, said: “This has been happening to me for ages and I thought I was going insane. I would wake up two hours after my alarm was set, look at my watch and the alarm was going off silently with no sound or haptics.”
Others shared stories of alarms going off during their commute to work, with one comment suggesting the issue traced all the way back to iOS 9, which was released in 2015. User givingback11 simply said in response, “I feel vindicated”.
Whether all of these comments reflect reality is nearly impossible to determine, but what is clear is that there’s a real sense of discontent in the iPhone user base about what should be one of the most reliable features of any smartphone.
Furthermore, this isn’t the first time we’ve reported on this issue. Following a segment on NBC’s Today Show that highlighted issues with iPhone alarms, Apple issued a statement saying a fix was on the way. Nine months and a full version of iOS later, and it seems that the issue is persisting.
In our previous report, we explained that the Attention Aware feature added with iOS 17 may shoulder some of the blame – this is a setting that lowers the volume of alerts when your iPhone senses you’re looking at it.
Still, we’d like to think the iPhone is context-aware enough to determine when a user is sleeping, or to simply exclude alarms from the Attention Aware feature.
Granted, we don’t know exactly which model of iPhone or version of iOS user bryanlolwut is working with, but the image shared (above) shows the alarm notifying via the Dynamic Island, which would make the phone an iPhone 14 Pro or newer and goes to show that even the latest and best iPhones aren’t immune from the problem.
We reached out to Apple for comment on the issue, but have received no response at the time of writing.
Still, iPhone-owning oversleepers are sure to feel some sense of relief at these continued reports, which at the very least suggest that waking up late might not be entirely their fault. We’ll have the latest updates as we hear them via our dedicated iPhone coverage.
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