Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. A lot of iPhone users are complaining on social media that their daily alarms are not going off at their scheduled times, and the only solution to the pesky issue appears to be disabling a particular feature from the Settings menu.
Although presented as a new thing on NBC’s April 30 Today Show, this iOS bug has made headlines on our little website here at least another two times over the last year or so. Clearly, Apple hasn’t done a very good job of exterminating the bug, once again acknowledging the issue in an official statement and promising to work on a “fix.”
While many people have been led to think that the alarm app on their iPhone is broken, Apple seems to suggest this is not playing the “expected sound” at the expected time, which is a slightly different thing.
Just like back in December and June 2023, users affected by this glitch are advised to turn off Attention Aware from the “Face ID & Passcode” sub-menu of their iPhones’ Settings app. This is a feature and not a bug, mind you, but it might be causing your alarms to go off silently by wrongly detecting user “awareness.”
Basically, your iPhone might think you’re already awake when you’re actually not, disabling or silencing your alarms so as not to make you overly grumpy in the morning, which in turn can cause a lot of headaches and far more serious problems.
While this little workaround sounds pretty straightforward and easy to apply, Apple still needs to find a more comprehensive and definitive fix for its iPhone alarm issues. In the meantime, you might want to consider putting a good old fashioned standalone alarm clock device on your nightstand or even switching to an Android handset. Just don’t choose a Google Pixel or you may well run into similar troubles.