Even though fancy alarm clocks still exist, most of us rely on our fancier smartphones to wake us up in the morning.
However, while an iPhone may be more expensive than any physical alarm clock on the market, it doesn’t mean it’s more reliable.
One iPhone user took to Reddit to share the feature in all its unreliable glory. Posting to r/ios, they shared that they missed college, due to the alarm app being broken.
Despite enabling the multitude of alarms before they went to sleep (one for every 5 minutes as shown by the accompanying screenshot) the alarms never went off. As a result, the Reddit user missed a day of college, even though the alarms are clearly toggled on in the screenshot, as marked by the green indicators.
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While investigating what happened, the Reddit user discovered that the alarms weren't enabled after all, despite ‘being checked in the alarm list.’
This apparent iPhone bug caused the user to be unable to rely on the alarm app, which likely many of us rely on, every single day.
Luckily, some users took to the comments to share fixes, and what they suspect could be behind the puzzling alarm app issue.
Fellow Reddit user Abe-Pizza_Bankruptcy shared that turning off the ‘Attention Aware’ settings can help ensure any set alarms still sound at their allocated time.
For those not in the know, when enabled, the Attention Aware features in your iPhone checks whether you’re actively paying attention to your Apple device.
For example, if it suspects you aren’t looking at your fancy iPhone, it’ll dim the brightness of the screen. Alternatively, it can also lower the volume of the sound of your phone, which includes the sounds of any alerts set.
With that in mind, it’s highly likely that feature could interfere with any set alarms.
When you’re sleeping you’re (hopefully) not actively using your phone. With the Attention Aware feature enabled, that could allow your phone to lower the sound of your alarms, to a volume where you sleep right through them.
Within the sea of comments, another r/ios user explained that there was a ‘separate sleep alarm’ that doesn’t get affected by the Attention Aware issues.
An app many Apple fans had forgotten that it even existed.
As an alternative, they suggested using the ‘Sleep Focus schedule’ feature, located within the Health app on any modern iPhone.
Unlike the basic alarm app, the Sleep Focus feature is designed around setting up regular sleeping schedules. With these schedules, you can set not just your wake up time, but what time you want to go to sleep, and what days you want them set for.
This app can be accessed by navigating from: Settings > Focus > Sleep.
Not only will having Attention Aware not get in the way of using the Sleep Focus feature, but it can filter out phone calls, notifications and let friends know you're catching up on some well-needed beauty sleep.