18 ms·

I overslept because iOS 14 disabled my alarm

496 points by dewey 6y ago

cryptoz 6y ago
"It just works"
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  And if it doesn't, "you're holding it wrong™" or "you'll need a motherboard replacement and since your Apple Care is out that'll be $700".
- pojntfx 6y ago
  “And if it doesn’t, just wipe everything, loose all data and configuration, and reinstall”
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  "Sorry, your old MBP SSD doesn't work in the motherboard replacement. You have a backup, right?"
vbezhenar 6y ago
Those people installing new OS on day one are my heroes. I applaud them for their heroic effort to find all bugs, so I can install it few months later and have good experience.
- NamTaf 6y ago
  I need some way to spice up my lockdown life. I've already fallen in love with the tighter privacy permissions. For example, I no longer have to give apps an all-or-nothing access to my pics. This is a gamechanger because I bet a bunch of apps scrape the geodata from pics to harvest your location history, and now I only have to give them the ones I want to give them.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    How does it work with already installed applications? Will it ask again or I need to check every application and re-configure permissions as needed?
    - jtbayly 6y ago
      It will ask again. At least it did for me.
    - simon1573 6y ago
      They are handled equally. Both prompts whenever they want to access your photos.
    - FridgeSeal 6y ago
      It asks afresh. As a concrete example, I've been running the iOS 14 beta for the last week and a bit, Facebook Messenger previously had full access to my photos, and when using it for the first time I got a message from the OS explaining that I no longer needed to grant it carte-blanche access and whether I'd like to deny it access, pick the photos I'd specifically like to give it access to, or let it continue having full access.
  - ubermonkey 6y ago
    Whoa. What iOS apps do this?
    - philsnow 6y ago
      > What iOS apps do this? What iOS apps (that you've given access to your photos) can you have any confidence don't do this?
      - clankyclanker 6y ago
        It’s too bad. You used to be able to have some confidence, sometimes: https://www.engadget.com/2011-01-09-the-gpl-the-app-store-and-you.html https://www.engadget.com/2011-01-09-the-gpl-the-app-store-an...
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  The real question is why doesn't Apple have enough Testing and QA to catch stuff like this? It's not like they can't afford it or they need to suport a bazillion possible HW configurations like Android and Windows. They design and own the whole product stack from silicon to OS so poor QA is inexcusable here. Edit: if you're down voting my statement could you please elaborate why? Thanks.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    Probably because cost of testing does not justify profits from well-tested software. Apple is commercial company. They didn't sign any obligations to produce bug-less software. And the fact that they are richest (or one of the richest) companies in the world means that they did math correctly.
    - GiorgioG 6y ago
      No, it means they did some math correctly in the past. They built great hardware and coupled it with a usable OS/UX. I have tried Android several times and found it generally more buggy. However, iOS has progressively gotten more complex and buggy (I still have rotation bugs across all my devices.) At some point maybe I'll stop paying the Apple premium if all things are equally buggy.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    Or why don't they bother considering they broke the morning alarms now what... 4 times at least? (DST, new year, now this)
    - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
      Maybe because Apple users consider themselves locked in tot the ecosystem so they can't vote with their feet/wallets and walk to a competitor when they're tired of bugs so Apple feels no pressure to do right by their users. Am I right?
      - 6y ago
- dewey 6y ago
  To be fair the public / developer betas this year were pretty good compared to iOS 13 betas. It looks like the internal testing changes somehow improved things: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-21/apple-ios-14-features-changes-testing-after-ios-13-bugs https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-21/apple-ios...
  - GiorgioG 6y ago
    I buy Apple products because they are supposedly held to a higher standard. They do not get a pass just because iOS 14 is not as awful as their previous attempt.
    - bilbo0s 6y ago
      In fairness, they are held to a much higher standard. It's just that the vast majority of products out there are horrible, so when consumers get products like Apple makes they seem heavenly by comparison. And they are, but does that mean they are the best they can be? Probably also has a bit to do with Apple actually making efforts to improve, whereas others seem to make efforts only to copy Apple. Which doesn't help the situation. For consumers, the ideal, in my opinion, is competition on innovation, not really competition on who can be more "Apple-like".
      - leephillips 6y ago
        Higher than what? I respectfully disagree: https://web.archive.org/web/20090414133729/http://tomkarpik.com/articles/massive-data-loss-bug-in-leopard/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090414133729/http://tomkarpik....
      - GiorgioG 6y ago
        > In fairness, they are held to a much higher standard. With premium prices come premium expectations. If I buy a $3,000 MacBook Pro, I do not expect the colossal screwup that was the butterfly keyboard design defect. That's a hardware issue of course, but in general Apple's software quality has gone down, down down.
    - 6y ago
- ubermonkey 6y ago
  This right here. Every OTHER time something has come out like this, I waited -- at least 30 days, sometimes 60 or 90. Let other people risk productivity and annoyance! This time, though, I updated both my iPad and my phone last night, on release day. Why? Well, first, because hey, COVID era. My mobile phone isn't my business line (I have VOIP for that), and I'm obviously not traveling, so the risk was lower. But the REAL driver was this: iOS14 allows you to "pin" text conversations to the top of the list so you can get back to them quickly. This sounds trivial, but holy hell it really isn't. And in quarantine, I'm texting with people a LOT more than I used to.
- cevn 6y ago
  On the thread about the update yesterday hundreds were coming out of the woodworks to say how totally fine this update was haha.
- vxNsr 6y ago
  I got downvoted in the other thread for saying this. Ppl are surfacing all sorts of bugs that I wouldn’t wanna deal with. So what that one or two guys had a relatively bug-free beta experience, generally software has bugs these days during its initial release.
rbanffy 6y ago
The other day I missed my 1:1 with my direct manager because I was in Zoom, sharing my screen with a colleague and Zoom dutifully suppressed alerts, from the calendar, and the increasingly frustrated messages from him on Slack, while I was "presenting". Thank you, Zoom.
- arethuza 6y ago
  I've seen very unfortunate things happening when someone doesn't have notifications disabled when giving a presentation so I don't think this is a bad default.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    I quit all noisy apps before doing presentations. It's a healthy habit.
    - arethuza 6y ago
      It's actually a good argument for integration between screen-sharing apps and instant messaging/status - your status really should go to "Presenting" when you are presenting and for incoming alerts to automatically be hidden.
      - sktguha 6y ago
        That's a great idea!
        arethuza 6y ago
        It's how Microsoft Teams works, not my idea!
      - koyote 6y ago
        That's how Teams works and if I remember rightly even Skype for business/Lync had this way back.
danpalmer 6y ago
I also use "Bedtime", haven't set it up in the Health app, worked just fine.
Xelom 6y ago
This is an awful user experience. IOS asks to make these kind of updates while plugged into power at night. If I understand correctly, most of the users will be left with their alarms disabled in the middle of the night. I couldn’t understand how does Apple miss a critical point like this when their update functionality is focused on user’s sleeping hours.
- matthewmacleod 6y ago
  I don't think this is the case – the article mentions that this is explicitly related to the "bedtime" feature, rather than the more general "alarms" feature. I use this feature as well, updated to iOS 14 last night without changing anything or updating my settings, and the alarm still went off this morning – so it at least seems like it's a more complex failure that it might first seem.
  - Xelom 6y ago
    Thanks for elaborating. It seems like the impact would be much more less than what I expected.
andreasley 6y ago
Definitely not great, but if that's the main problem of this iOS update, I'd consider that a huge success.
Boxbot 6y ago
i can't remember which ios update it was but one of them removed the ability to set custom wake-up alarm sound (separate from the generic alarms). did it pop up a warning? no did it default to a built-in alarm sound? no did it just stop sounding the alarm, but still show it as active and selected in the config screen? yes
- heyoo 6y ago
  I simply stopped using the wake-up alarm function due to this. Never figured out how to make it work again.
  - Boxbot 6y ago
    same. i had multiple days of confusion 'cause i thought i was sleeping thru the alarm / half-consciously dismissing it (something i've had trouble with before) i'll never trust apple to provide a simple alarm clock again for anything important
8K832d7tNmiQ 6y ago
“I woke up late and well rested today.” Looks like a happy accident to me.
kevingadd 6y ago
This is like the fourth time an iOS update has broken the ability to use your phone as an alarm clock. Incredibly frustrating. I definitely missed meetings a couple times back when I owned a first-gen iPhone and relied on it for this - I eventually bought an old-fashioned clock. FWIW I've had similar problems with other phones in the past, so this isn't exclusively an Apple thing - but insufficient QA of alarms is a distressing ongoing problem with iOS and I don't know why they haven't made sure that it's a core part of their release process by now. Unfortunately once you generalize all your notification infrastructure, it becomes easier to break alarms. The Windows Alarms and Clock app relies on system notification infrastructure, so if notifications are silenced (there is a longstanding bug that causes this, and the people responsible for Win10 Notifications don't give a shit), the alarm sound doesn't play until the notification appears - often hours later. If they played the sound directly this wouldn't be an issue, but they assume notifications will work. Yay for abstraction and infrastructure...
agumonkey 6y ago
we're entering digital brazilocene, featuring w3c-golderg machines
- CGamesPlay 6y ago
  Did you mean "brazil ocean"? https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=brazilocene&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=brazilo...
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    no more like a portemanteau of brazil (the movie) and -cene, like anthropocene
  - elcomet 6y ago
    I think brazilocene is a reference to the movie Brazil (mostly about bureaucracy), and "cene", which is a suffix to design a geological epoch (like Paleocene)
viach 6y ago
> I woke up late and well rested today. And as usually with iOS, the user experience is excellent!
- Reason077 6y ago
  There's a values conflict between the Health and Clock apps here. Clock wants you to wake up on time. Health wants you to sleep in!
  - intricatedetail 6y ago
    It is a conflict between physical and mental health. If you sleep in you'll get anxiety about missed appointment and if you wake early you'll feel tired.
    - neuronic 6y ago
      It's a conflict between capitalism/modern performance society and being human. Of course, the common answer is drugs.
      - cultofmetatron 6y ago
        on my 3rd coffee as I read this. too real
        csunbird 6y ago
        Technically, coffee is a drug :)
        411111111111111 6y ago
        That's was his point of it being too real...
      - de_watcher 6y ago
        I prefer insanity as an answer.
flemhans 6y ago
My alarm rang normally in the morning after my phone updated itself in the night.
- kilroy123 6y ago
  Same here. In fact, I was surprised when I woke up to realize it had updated over night.
rednum 6y ago
Eh, that's nothing, few friend of mine had issues where Android would sometimes not ring alerts. Why? Who knows, maybe some weird bug that manifested itself in some combination of system settings and phone firmware. I have multiple devices so I usually set alert on home phone + work phone if it's something really important like a flight at 6 AM; but if I were to use an alarm clock everyday I'd probably buy the simplest one I can find for few bucks.
- waheoo 6y ago
  Yea my android misses alarms all the damn time. Well, that's what my boss thinks anyway.
- neutronicus 6y ago
  I switched to WhatsApp from Hangouts because I stopped getting alerts when my wife messaged me on Hangouts. Tried for a while to resolve it, but, fuck it, WhatsApp just works
- seventhtiger 6y ago
  I stopped using Samsung's clock alarm for this reason. It's quite hard to figure out as a heavy sleeper whether actually only 1 of my 5 alarms went off or I was just sleeping through them. One day I just stared at the clock app, not ringing, as my alarm time came and went. At least validated all those times I've doubted myself. Downloaded AMDroid now. Much better, and much more customizable, and it turns out I never actually sleep through an alarm, they just never went off. I also got really good at multiplying 2-digit numbers in a sleep-daze.
  - aitchnyu 6y ago
    My Samsung and now Nokia have gaslit me into long-term self-doubt if I sleep through alarms. In one near miss, I noticed the volume was lowered without my intention.
- jabroni_salad 6y ago
  I got bit by that twice and figured my old standard alarm clock would be good enough. Had it for 15 years and it has never missed a day. In industry, the more reliable you need something to be, the more simple it has to be. Phones are too complicated to be a good alarm clock. Plus I don't have to blast out my eyeballs to see what time it is in the dark.
Farbklex 6y ago
Ah, a disabled alarm. Classic. Let me tell you about my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 tablet. I always used a flip cover with a magnet which automatically puts the device in standby when it's closed. The tablet was always closed next to my bed as an alarm clock. After some time I noticed, that my alarm apparently didn't work. Turns out, that an update introduced a new feature: Closing the flip cover will automatically snooze the alarm. Problem is, that it also prevents an alarm from even starting, when the cover is already closed. Later they realized that it's a bug and disabled it again.
bartread 6y ago
iOS has had alarm issues for years. Sometimes my alarm will go off silently for no obvious reason (e.g., does not depend on whether phone is on silent or not - alarm should sound anyway). It happens so intermittently that I've never managed to figure out reproduction steps. Nevertheless, it's caused me problems enough times (missed trains to London, for example) that nowadays if it's really important for me to get up I'll always set a backup alarm on a different device (even a good old alarm clock). I really wish Apple would fix it.
- woutr_be 6y ago
  This happens to me so many times, sometimes I will wake up about 30 minutes after my alarm was supposed to go off. I've always wondered if I was somehow turning of my alarm while waking up and instantly falling back asleep or if my alarm just never went off.
- wrycoder 6y ago
  I updated to 13.7. I have the Bedtime alarm set for 7:30 AM. It went off at 3:00 AM the next morning. I’m pretty deaf, so awoke to my wife kicking and yelling at me. It took awhile to fumble it off. Why? And why 4 1/2 hours difference? In the morning, I screwed around with it for a bit and got it reset to 7:30. Or so I thought. It went off again at 3:00 PM. More screwing around. I suspect it’s somehow related to the fact I have the phone set for 24 hour time. Seems to be ok now, but I still have to update to 14.
pea 6y ago
One of my favourite things about the old blackberrys was that the alarm went off... even when the phone had 'run out' of battery! seriously awesome feature.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  Nokia 3310 had the same feature: you could turn it off, but the alarm was still working for weeks.
- kilroy123 6y ago
  Wow really? Did all of the models do that? I don't remember that feature.
  - carlmr 6y ago
    Almost all the old phones i had did that, also my old Siemens.
- netsharc 6y ago
  It would be an interesting feature to add to the bootloader, just boot to beep (and maybe buzz, depending on how much battery is left).
FearNotDaniel 6y ago
The whole site is an amusing and satisfying read, mostly because it's reassuring to know I'm not the only person who is really bothered by these kind of little UI niggles. I particularly love the one where a German insurance provider insists on ignoring the point of the 'I' in 'IBAN': https://annoying.technology/posts/8b0e0f1083d21073/ https://annoying.technology/posts/8b0e0f1083d21073/ [For non-europeans: the first two characters of an International Bank Account Number are the ones that identify the country; if they really wanted to insist that only Germany-registered bank accounts are allowed, there are more intuitive ways to validate that.]
- prox 6y ago
  Does anyone know the daily WTF? http://thedailywtf.com/ http://thedailywtf.com/ It’s Error’d articles are so much fun, and have been going on for ages.
  - corobo 6y ago
    Oh man I forgot about that site when I lost all my work bookmarks changing jobs! Think my favorite was the coal story http://thedailywtf.com/articles/special-delivery http://thedailywtf.com/articles/special-delivery Edit: The real daily wtf is that they're still on http
    - Kye 6y ago
      HTTPS works, but they don't do a redirect. https://thedailywtf.com/ https://thedailywtf.com/
      - corobo 6y ago
        I came in via search engine. If they're not redirecting then it might as well be off.
        zrm 6y ago
        https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
person977777 6y ago
Apple knows better than you when your alarm should be activated. You were “holding the phone wrong”.
elramon 6y ago
and you took the time to write a post about this. wow
sillysaurusx 6y ago
This was a persistent problem in iOS 6 and made me late for work at least 5 times. Eventually I learned never to rely on iOS alarms.
toxik 6y ago
I do not trust smartphones for my wake up alarm, been bitten too many times. A simple battery driven one is just so much more reliable.
scarface74 6y ago
I just checked. I am on iOS 14 and it did migrate my sleep and wake time to the health app. Edit: The alarm went off at the appropriate time.
dutch3000 6y ago
New title - “I used beta software and found a bug”
- dewey 6y ago
  It's not beta software any more. The official public release was yesterday.
stemuk 6y ago
On iPadOS 14 the bedtime feature got removed entirely since there is no Health App available for iPads. I guess i have to say goodbye to using my iPad as a high tech alarm clock for now...
html5web 6y ago
Great story! My wife uses alarm, and I have to turn it off literally every day. I wish same thing happens for us, even once )))
Hnaomyiph 6y ago
I exclusively use the bedtime alarm and it did not disable itself for me. I only learned that it moved from the clock app to health app after it woke me up and I wanted to change the wake up time.
- hnarn 6y ago
  Same here, the "bedtime alarm" went off as normal this morning and it's what I use to wake up every morning. I updated to iOS 14 yesterday evening. I wonder what differs, maybe the model or some other factor like whether you have other alarms at all (even disabled).
  - Hnaomyiph 6y ago
    "or some other factor like whether you have other alarms at all (even disabled)" This is the only thing I can think of as a reason why. I have no other active alarms, iPhone 6s. I think the actual annoying technology part would be that in my half-awake stupor I wasn't able to find that the bedtime alarm moved to the health app without Googling it. As searching "bedtime" in the app search bar still shows the old bedtime app and still launches you into the clock app.
  - stinos 6y ago
    "bedtime alarm" ... it's what I use to wake up every morning Non-native English speaker here: doesn't bedtime refer to the time you go to bed, not the time you have to wake up? I mean, I was reading "bedtime alarm" and thought "so people these days use an alarm to tell them when to go to bad? crazy times" but then that shifted in "wait does an application use a rather confusing term for something as common as getting out of bed?"
    - hnarn 6y ago
      There’s two parts to the alarm and it isn’t consistently called “the bedtime alarm” by Apple to my knowledge. The first part is the “bedtime” alarm (it’s time to go to bed!) and the second part is the wake-up, which makes it slightly different in that and other ways from a normal alarm.
mrcnkoba 6y ago
I learnt this hard way. I never install version .0. They are usually full of bugs. The later, the better usually .2/3 should be fine.
dirtnugget 6y ago
I fell asleep before the update went through. Had a regular alarm set instead of bed time. It rang through despite the phone being SIM-locked and basically still in update mode.
joejohnson 6y ago
I also upgraded and it migrated my alarm and woke me up at my usual time... Also, the sleep alarm is still visible at the top of your alarms list in the Clock app. Not sure what the confusion is here.
josefrichter 6y ago
I'd understand one annoyed tweet to went your frustration. But an article? +Someone posting it to HN? +131 points as of now? Srsly?
- mdavidn 6y ago
  I think a bug that could impact everyone relying on the iOS alarm (including me) is newsworthy and useful.
Dirlewanger 6y ago
Pointless crap like this is what happens when you employ a team of UI designers full-time: PMs feel guilty about wasting their time so they give them pointless projects to "modernize" the UI and to make the product more "holistic" and they come back with completely unnecessary and frustrating changes like this. See also: the new reddit/YouTube designs.
martin-adams 6y ago
Back in the day when iOS couldn't handle daylight savings, I was driving onto the onramp for the motorway to get to work when my wakeup alarm went off. Not the first time this type of issue has happened, probably won't be the last.
Angostura 6y ago
Every beta I put in a feedback item saying that moving bedtime from Clock (where it was easily found) to the horror of trying to find it among heart rate data in Health was really grim Obvously took my reports to heart (heh)
- projektfu 6y ago
  I know, seems like a bad move. God forbid it’s accessible in both places.
- rconti 6y ago
  Health has taken a number of steps backwards. For one, you have to dig into various screens to find weight+body fat%, and then go into each item, click "Add data" and then back out to the next one if you want to update both at the same time.
atemerev 6y ago
The same thing happened with iOS 13. As an ADHD sufferer, I heavily depend on tens of alarms and reminders. Suffice to say it wasn't a good day for me, where all these were suddenly silent.
gjsman-1000 6y ago
This happened to me on iOS 14 a few times now, except the alarm still shows as enabled in the clock app. At least those days weren’t terribly important...
shazzzm 6y ago
For one of my first phone interviews, my motorola had a helpful feature where it would mute notifications during a calendar event. Since I'd put the interview in my calendar, it put the phone on silent so I missed the call!
- Insanity 6y ago
  Maybe that was a bug, wrongly promoted as a 'helpful feature' :).
- bemmu 6y ago
  My old Nokia phone had a few feature I discovered during my first class in front of a new professor. I turned off my phone at start of class, but little did I know that the Nokia will ring the morning alarm even if your phone is off. It was very loud in the quiet classroom, he gave me a look of “now I hate you”, and I didn’t even try to explain that actually, the phone is off.
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    A few years ago I missed a very important work engagement because it discovered the opposite. The LG Nexus wouldn’t ring the alarm when the phone was set to silent. I literally had to show it to my manager which was furious.
  - nixy 6y ago
    I had the exact same problem as a 12 year old kid, only I was in assembly where Auschwitz survivor Emerich Roth was telling us about his hardships. He stopped with annoyed patience and waited for me to silence the alarm before continuing. I don't think I've ever felt so bad.
    - FriendlyNormie 6y ago
      Don’t feel bad when you interrupt some lying Jew spewing his poison into the minds of all your peers. Your phone was the hero of the hour.
  - 6y ago
booleandilemma 6y ago
This is why I always set 2 alarms on 2 different devices. It sucks, but I’ve been burned a few times now by an alarm not going off, for whatever reason.
- slantyyz 6y ago
  I do the same, sometimes with more than 2 devices depending on the importance of the alarm. Every time I read about an alarm bug, it makes me think about the iPhone New Year's Day alarm bug that caused a couple to miss their fertility treatments[1]. That story made me so sad, because anyone who has been through that process knows how important timing is, and how expensive the entire process is. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120604024148/http://consumerist.com/2011/01/iphone-alarm-bug-makes-couple-miss-fertility-treatment.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120604024148/http://consumeris...
exabrial 6y ago
Why is silicon valley getting more passive aggressive and hostile? Now dismissal dialogs day "maybe later" instead "no thanks", and product features are becoming non optional opt ins like this. Stop and think before you implement something like this and push back on your boss.
- codydh 6y ago
  I think sometimes less confident users see a "No Thanks" as "Not Ever," and are worried they'll disable something. "Maybe Later" communicates the choice isn't permanent and they can come back to it later if they want.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    I see "Maybe Later" as "we'll force it on you sooner or later", because that's what it often means in reality.
  - exabrial 6y ago
    then there should be three options: 0) Yes. 1) No means no. 2) Not right now
dryfish 6y ago
I clicked update at bedtime thinking this would happen but then I forgot about it. This post has reminded me and I'm surprised that my alarm did actually go off this morning.
ebg13 6y ago
> Unfortunately the migration is done by disabling your existing alarm and showing a button to open the Health app to set it up again. I think this is wrong. My alarm worked fine this morning. Knowing what we know about how people behave in their sleep, it seems likely that they might have just turned their alarm off at the right time without fully waking up. I've done that in the past.
javajosh 6y ago
Well, this is what happens when your mind is a bicycle for your computer.
WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
Annoyed because woke up well rested. Kids these days and their priorities.
prawn 6y ago
I can't remember if it was iOS/OSX or something else, but I had a situation where I'd backed up my device before migrating to new hardware, set an alarm, then restored to the new device from the backup. Of course, the backup predated the alarm being set, so it never went off on the new device. Took me a while to realise why...
timvisee 6y ago
iOS not ringing set alarms. This has happened before.
deleted 6y ago
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hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
I think this is also a good example of how "smart" technology is infinitely more fragile than "dumb" technology. I had a similar issue way back in the day with the first iPhone, where there was a bug if you had something pop up with a modal alert in the middle of the night the alarm wouldn't go off because only one modal at a time was allowed. I've had a couple similar experiences since, and because of that I always set a simple "dumb" alarm clock whenever I have something important I need to get up for. It has literally never had an issue, simply works exactly how I want it, every time.
- buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
  Exactly. One time my father in law had a bunch of people over to watch an outdoor movie on his new projector. For sounds, he got a Bose smart sound bar with a few companion speakers that connect to it wirelessly. There wasn't a wire in sight besides the power cord. Well, needless to say, there were sound issues because each individual speaker needed to be connected to the wi-fi, which wasn't great because we were out in the back yard. Almost ruined the whole night. Luckily I had a 100ft ethernet cable and we were able to move the router out to the backyard. It fixed the issue, but only after an hour long delay. I couldn't help but think how much nicer it would have been to just have some good old fashion dumb speakers connected with speaker wire to a receiver.
  - m463 6y ago
    I've seen this same scenario happen so many times with: - trying to start a video conference without installing anything - trying to share a screen - heck, trying to start a videoconference at all - hooking laptop to projector at a conference
  - fomine3 6y ago
    The incident shows importance of testing.
- thewebcount 6y ago
  I've had issues with dumb alarm clocks. Power goes out or batteries die and the alarm doesn't go off. Analog alarm clocks can only be turned on < 12 hours in advance and I'd often forget. Even waking up to the sun coming up fails when it's cloudy. But I agree those failure modes are less common than what we get with network-connected digital everything.
darrmit 6y ago
I did not experience this. My iOS Bedtime alarm went off as expected even though it was moved to Health (and I didn't notice until seeing this article).
cpach 6y ago
I don’t think this bug would affect me since I have lots of redundancy for my mourning routines: 15 alarms on my private iPhone, 5 alarms on my work iPhone and one alarm on my physical alarm clock. YMMV. (Yeah that setup is a tad bit excessive but I find it useful when needing to catch the train at 06:25.)
- diebeforei485 6y ago
  OS updates aside, you should look into a smartwatch haptic alarm. Those are quiet and very effective, and audio-based alarms (alarm clock or phone) can act as a backup.
  - cpach 6y ago
    Cool! So far I haven’t jumped on the smartwatch train though. Perhaps in the future :)
kuon 6y ago
I think the best thing about being a freelance is that I can have the luxury of not having an alarm and I wake up when I wake up. I put all my meeting with customers in the afternoon. Since I stopped having an alarm in the morning, I'm much happier in my life, less tired, less stressed, and in the end I can do more work.
- dylan604 6y ago
  I got a cat about this time last year. I haven't needed an alarm clock since.
  - toast0 6y ago
    Just FYI, as a long time cat owner. An alarm clock cat will be a reliable alarm clock, except when you have a very important meeting when it will let you sleep. Either because it's emotionally connected to you, and senses you were nervous and having bad sleep and didn't want to disturb you, or becauae it's a cat and thought it would be fun to mess with you. If you have a good cat was supposed to wake me up story when you make it to the meeting, your very important clients will laugh and be amused. You won't get this contract, but you'll be considered for future ones.
xlii 6y ago
Interestingly enough, nothing like this happened to me, and I'm using exact same features as OP. Bad luck I guess. However, it reminds me about some other situation that I'd like to share as it amuse me to this day. Some time ago I was traveling to my clients city. I was provided with a flat of one of coworkers who - at the same time was delegated elsewhere. So that was kind of AirBnB but it was all "paid" by company (in a way, that he got compensation and I had place to stay). I went to sleep fairly late and barely shut my eye when at 2am his Android tablet started to ring. I have no idea what was up with it, was it default alarm or some custom one, but there was no way for me to disable it. None of the physical buttons worked and every touch interaction spawned the lock screen through which I couldn't get past. On top of it, the sound was getting louder and louder. It didn't ring for 20 minutes when the police came knocking. Someone complained about the noise. I said that the device isn't mine and I'm only taking care of friend's flat and that there is nothing I can do about it. Showed device to them, we fiddled together with it but couldn't turn it off neither. Police wanted to hand me a ticket, but that wasn't easy. I was foreigner so they had to collect on spot. Once they confirmed that they decided to not make me any troubles and asked me to try and to muffle the tablet. After 3h of constant noise it seemed like device decided to stop ringing by itself. Since I was awake full night, I took day of and notified the client that it's either hotel for me or I'm going back home, cause I decline to be in the same place as the dreaded device to which they agreed. That almost was the end of the story, but week later I learned it wasn't end of it. Coworker, the owner of the device (who refused to provide me with the code, since it can't be that bad), came back to his door which kicked out by the firefighters. It seemed like neighbors called the police again day/days later. Police couldn't get in but they heard the alarm so they called the firefighters who assuming that one of the smoke alarm went off decided to break in to find only ringing tablet. To this day I rather not being woken up than suffer through the Alarm from Hell.
- blkhawk 6y ago
  protip: holding down the power button will kill all android devices after 10-ish seconds.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
carlmr 6y ago
It happened a few times already that my Huawei (P20 and P30) loaded a software update at night and then got stuck at Pin entry, before loading alarms. I'm wondering if the sim cards in other countries don't have a pin.
qz2 6y ago
This is annoying me. It’s simply too complicated now. We’ve gone past the realms of deterministic behaviour into some undefinable benefit which requires administration and understanding past “wake me up then” I’m going to buy an alarm clock and leave the phone on my desk.
Normille 6y ago
Ironic that a blog dedicated to annoying technology is illustrated with countless screengrabs, many of which are too small to be able to read what is displayed on them. So I clicked on one of the images, expecting it to open a larger [more legible] version... [Normille was annoyed on 17 September.]
- dewey 6y ago
  Thanks for the feedback, in 99% of the cases what's written there is not important though.
earthboundkid 6y ago
Ha, I literally did not update to iOS 14 last night because I figured it would mess up the alarm.
Dumblydorr 6y ago
I used an old windows phone that had a full qwerty keyboard and the horizontal screen slid up over it, really old design from around 2007. Well, this phone was a terrible alarm, because it literally went to Sleep itself. Upon first getting it, I ran into my physics exam that was 75% done and had to explain that both my phone AND I overslept.
m1117 6y ago
My alarm on Pixel stopped working one day and just is silent. Maybe I did something with settings, maybe it's broken, I have no idea.
whalesalad 6y ago
Get a dog. My dogs can tell time so well that I hardly even look at a clock all day long. Waking up, breakfast, mid-day worktime breaks, dinner and bed are all pre-planned!
jcadam 6y ago
I still have a basic alarm clock with a battery for back-up. Back when I was in the Army and oversleeping carried somewhat harsher consequences, I also had a mechanical wind-up clock as a backup. I would absolutely never trust a software-controlled device as complex as a smartphone to wake me up in the morning. If I'm traveling on business, I'll set the room alarm clock and also request a wake up call from the front desk.
- tzs 6y ago
  I still have a mechanical wind-up alarm clock, a Westclox Baby Ben. It is my longest owned possession, except possibly for some books. Even if I go over a decade between occasions where I use it, it still works.
rad_gruchalski 6y ago
"I woke up late and well rested today." So all in all, it's good. No?
outside1234 6y ago
And so it begins. Thank you all for testing the OS for when I install it in three months.
gfiorav 6y ago
I left it updating overnight. The alarm went off as expected. I was surprised!
johnhenry 6y ago
> I woke up late and well rested today. Sometimes life gives us gifts in the form of grievances.
tiffanyh 6y ago
TLDR: "my $1,200 alarm clock didn't work as expected" :)
Zelphyr 6y ago
I'm genuinely worried about Apple now. It seemed to me that, for the most part, they had avoided the "change for change's sake" mentality that is rampant in the tech industry. Moving Bedtime to Health is clearly that. Sure, it could have easily lived in Health just as much as it could live in the Clock app. I can't think if a real reason to move it wholesale, though. Other apps can share data with the Health app, why not Clock? All because some PM at Apple thought, "I gotta change something or they won't think I'm doing anything."
- Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago
  My guess is that the new sleep tracking features are a part of health (not clock, where they would be out of place). Since bedtime is also sleep related, it got moved to health as well. Doesn't seem like change for change's sake at all.
hcarvalhoalves 6y ago
I still wear a cheap Casio G-Shock. I learned to not rely on phones for time keeping, alarms, etc. A device that constantly runs out of battery is too unreliable for that. An update breaking the alarm is just the cherry on top.
greggman3 6y ago
I run into a few iOS bugs often. Today, 3 times today alone, I paused audio (tap on airpod) and then 5 minutes later tap to resume, nope, tap again, nope, tap harder! nope, tap harder again angry now that the damn phone isn't effing working, unlock phone, audio starts :( Another I run into often, especially with face masks on, is trying to unlock with a code and how iOS, for lack of a better way to describe it, has an input buffer. Let's say your code is 123456 and by accident you enter 1123456. It will error at 112345 but it will register the 6 so when the error finishes I quickly enter 123456 which it sees as 612345 (error) with a buffered 6, so repeat two or three more times getting angrier and frustrated that the EFFING phone won't unlock. Finally stop, delete the buffered 6 and enter 123456. There's absolutely no good reason to buffer the 6 that happened 1/2 a second ago (or whatever the error delay is) IMO. I have a feeling the new "smart home screen" is going to really suck with it's AI trying to surface apps for you meaning you can never know where to find an app. This seems so antithetical to everything Apple wrote about UI design in the 80s and 90s. I know app ABC is on the first screen 3rd row on the left. App DEF is on the second screen 2nd row on the right. But no longer, now, at ever time of the day, at least according to the iOS 14 ad here https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/09/ios-14-is-available-today/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/09/ios-14-is-available-t... the icons will move at different times of the day on the whim of the OS. That sounds like hell to me
- Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago
  The "Smart Home Screens" (actually called "App Library") is a totally optional feature. You make it sound like the phone will just start moving your apps for no reason (which it won't do).
- marnett 6y ago
  > Another I run into often, especially with face masks on, is trying to unlock with a code and how iOS, for lack of a better way to describe it, has an input buffer. I know exactly what you are referring to and to this day it dumbfounds me this UX has not been fixed. It is an abysmal experience.
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  My personal favorite is an old iOS bug that I ended up going through a super-convoluted process to report and that they finally fixed. The bug was extremely simple: the calculator app would ignore the decimal point depending on whether the phone was held vertically or horizontally. Steps to reproduce: 1. Open the calculator application 2. Ensure the app is held vertically (non-scientific mode) 3. Enter a number such as 10,000,000 4. Attempt to make the number 10,000,000.1 by pressing "." and "1" 5. Notice that instead of this number, the calculator application converts the input to 100,000,001 - i.e. the decimal point was ignored. I wouldn’t have minded, except I only discovered the bug during a finance final in grad school, and It took me three attempts before thinking “maybe the calculator is wrong”... Bug id 6743558 for posterity :)
sigzero 6y ago
No, you overslept because you didn't make sure you alarm was set.
- dewey 6y ago
  The point of technology is to make life easier, if I'd have to check every time that everything is done correctly I might as well use a manual alarm I have to set.
heavenlyblue 6y ago
There is also a bug in iOS that disables the sound of alarm/timer from time to time. The alarm goes off with the screen showing the alarm but no sound at all. In my case it usually reappears every month or so and is only fixed by rebooting. It’s not related to system sounds because I had checked the alarm settings a few times Wondering if it’s only me.
jaimex2 6y ago
Classic Apple
simonblack 6y ago
We have a fridge with a third drawer that can be configured as either 'fridge' or 'freezer'. It has a 'Lock' to prevent the configuration from being changed accidentally. We had ours set (and locked) to be in 'freezer' mode. Yesterday, we turned off the electricity for a few moments to do some work. Later that day, I felt some frozen bread in that drawer and discovered that it was starting to thaw. By turning off the electricity, we had reset the mode to 'fridge', even though all of the other temperature settings in the fridge maintained their previous configuration. Why did all of the other settings remain, but that one didn't? Such annoying technology.
blackrock 6y ago
Is it obvious to anyone, that to disable the alarm, you must press the home button? However, the snooze button is on the screen, as a big red button. But yet, the disable command is a small hyperlink text? And you’re somehow supposed to accurately hit this small text, while you’re half asleep? Unless of course, you knew that you can also hit the home button. Another stupid design from the Apple design team.
abhinavkumars 6y ago
You are correct the bedtime alarm was disabled by sleep it is buggy on iOS14

496 points by dewey 6y ago

cryptoz 6y ago

"It just works"

ChuckNorris89 6y ago
And if it doesn't, "you're holding it wrong™" or "you'll need a motherboard replacement and since your Apple Care is out that'll be $700".
pojntfx 6y ago
“And if it doesn’t, just wipe everything, loose all data and configuration, and reinstall”
redis_mlc 6y ago
"Sorry, your old MBP SSD doesn't work in the motherboard replacement. You have a backup, right?"

vbezhenar 6y ago

Those people installing new OS on day one are my heroes. I applaud them for their heroic effort to find all bugs, so I can install it few months later and have good experience.

NamTaf 6y ago
I need some way to spice up my lockdown life. I've already fallen in love with the tighter privacy permissions. For example, I no longer have to give apps an all-or-nothing access to my pics. This is a gamechanger because I bet a bunch of apps scrape the geodata from pics to harvest your location history, and now I only have to give them the ones I want to give them.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  How does it work with already installed applications? Will it ask again or I need to check every application and re-configure permissions as needed?
  - jtbayly 6y ago
    It will ask again. At least it did for me.
  - simon1573 6y ago
    They are handled equally. Both prompts whenever they want to access your photos.
  - FridgeSeal 6y ago
    It asks afresh. As a concrete example, I've been running the iOS 14 beta for the last week and a bit, Facebook Messenger previously had full access to my photos, and when using it for the first time I got a message from the OS explaining that I no longer needed to grant it carte-blanche access and whether I'd like to deny it access, pick the photos I'd specifically like to give it access to, or let it continue having full access.
- ubermonkey 6y ago
  Whoa. What iOS apps do this?
  - philsnow 6y ago
    > What iOS apps do this? What iOS apps (that you've given access to your photos) can you have any confidence don't do this?
    - clankyclanker 6y ago
      It’s too bad. You used to be able to have some confidence, sometimes: https://www.engadget.com/2011-01-09-the-gpl-the-app-store-and-you.html https://www.engadget.com/2011-01-09-the-gpl-the-app-store-an...
ChuckNorris89 6y ago
The real question is why doesn't Apple have enough Testing and QA to catch stuff like this? It's not like they can't afford it or they need to suport a bazillion possible HW configurations like Android and Windows. They design and own the whole product stack from silicon to OS so poor QA is inexcusable here. Edit: if you're down voting my statement could you please elaborate why? Thanks.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  Probably because cost of testing does not justify profits from well-tested software. Apple is commercial company. They didn't sign any obligations to produce bug-less software. And the fact that they are richest (or one of the richest) companies in the world means that they did math correctly.
  - GiorgioG 6y ago
    No, it means they did some math correctly in the past. They built great hardware and coupled it with a usable OS/UX. I have tried Android several times and found it generally more buggy. However, iOS has progressively gotten more complex and buggy (I still have rotation bugs across all my devices.) At some point maybe I'll stop paying the Apple premium if all things are equally buggy.
- viraptor 6y ago
  Or why don't they bother considering they broke the morning alarms now what... 4 times at least? (DST, new year, now this)
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    Maybe because Apple users consider themselves locked in tot the ecosystem so they can't vote with their feet/wallets and walk to a competitor when they're tired of bugs so Apple feels no pressure to do right by their users. Am I right?
    - 6y ago
dewey 6y ago
To be fair the public / developer betas this year were pretty good compared to iOS 13 betas. It looks like the internal testing changes somehow improved things: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-21/apple-ios-14-features-changes-testing-after-ios-13-bugs https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-21/apple-ios...
- GiorgioG 6y ago
  I buy Apple products because they are supposedly held to a higher standard. They do not get a pass just because iOS 14 is not as awful as their previous attempt.
  - bilbo0s 6y ago
    In fairness, they are held to a much higher standard. It's just that the vast majority of products out there are horrible, so when consumers get products like Apple makes they seem heavenly by comparison. And they are, but does that mean they are the best they can be? Probably also has a bit to do with Apple actually making efforts to improve, whereas others seem to make efforts only to copy Apple. Which doesn't help the situation. For consumers, the ideal, in my opinion, is competition on innovation, not really competition on who can be more "Apple-like".
    - leephillips 6y ago
      Higher than what? I respectfully disagree: https://web.archive.org/web/20090414133729/http://tomkarpik.com/articles/massive-data-loss-bug-in-leopard/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090414133729/http://tomkarpik....
    - GiorgioG 6y ago
      > In fairness, they are held to a much higher standard. With premium prices come premium expectations. If I buy a $3,000 MacBook Pro, I do not expect the colossal screwup that was the butterfly keyboard design defect. That's a hardware issue of course, but in general Apple's software quality has gone down, down down.
  - 6y ago
ubermonkey 6y ago
This right here. Every OTHER time something has come out like this, I waited -- at least 30 days, sometimes 60 or 90. Let other people risk productivity and annoyance! This time, though, I updated both my iPad and my phone last night, on release day. Why? Well, first, because hey, COVID era. My mobile phone isn't my business line (I have VOIP for that), and I'm obviously not traveling, so the risk was lower. But the REAL driver was this: iOS14 allows you to "pin" text conversations to the top of the list so you can get back to them quickly. This sounds trivial, but holy hell it really isn't. And in quarantine, I'm texting with people a LOT more than I used to.
cevn 6y ago
On the thread about the update yesterday hundreds were coming out of the woodworks to say how totally fine this update was haha.
vxNsr 6y ago
I got downvoted in the other thread for saying this. Ppl are surfacing all sorts of bugs that I wouldn’t wanna deal with. So what that one or two guys had a relatively bug-free beta experience, generally software has bugs these days during its initial release.

rbanffy 6y ago

The other day I missed my 1:1 with my direct manager because I was in Zoom, sharing my screen with a colleague and Zoom dutifully suppressed alerts, from the calendar, and the increasingly frustrated messages from him on Slack, while I was "presenting". Thank you, Zoom.

arethuza 6y ago
I've seen very unfortunate things happening when someone doesn't have notifications disabled when giving a presentation so I don't think this is a bad default.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rbanffy 6y ago
  I quit all noisy apps before doing presentations. It's a healthy habit.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    It's actually a good argument for integration between screen-sharing apps and instant messaging/status - your status really should go to "Presenting" when you are presenting and for incoming alerts to automatically be hidden.
    - sktguha 6y ago
      That's a great idea!
      - arethuza 6y ago
        It's how Microsoft Teams works, not my idea!
    - koyote 6y ago
      That's how Teams works and if I remember rightly even Skype for business/Lync had this way back.

danpalmer 6y ago

I also use "Bedtime", haven't set it up in the Health app, worked just fine.

Xelom 6y ago

This is an awful user experience. IOS asks to make these kind of updates while plugged into power at night. If I understand correctly, most of the users will be left with their alarms disabled in the middle of the night. I couldn’t understand how does Apple miss a critical point like this when their update functionality is focused on user’s sleeping hours.

matthewmacleod 6y ago
I don't think this is the case – the article mentions that this is explicitly related to the "bedtime" feature, rather than the more general "alarms" feature. I use this feature as well, updated to iOS 14 last night without changing anything or updating my settings, and the alarm still went off this morning – so it at least seems like it's a more complex failure that it might first seem.
- Xelom 6y ago
  Thanks for elaborating. It seems like the impact would be much more less than what I expected.

andreasley 6y ago

Definitely not great, but if that's the main problem of this iOS update, I'd consider that a huge success.

Boxbot 6y ago

i can't remember which ios update it was but one of them removed the ability to set custom wake-up alarm sound (separate from the generic alarms). did it pop up a warning? no did it default to a built-in alarm sound? no did it just stop sounding the alarm, but still show it as active and selected in the config screen? yes

heyoo 6y ago
I simply stopped using the wake-up alarm function due to this. Never figured out how to make it work again.
- Boxbot 6y ago
  same. i had multiple days of confusion 'cause i thought i was sleeping thru the alarm / half-consciously dismissing it (something i've had trouble with before) i'll never trust apple to provide a simple alarm clock again for anything important

8K832d7tNmiQ 6y ago

“I woke up late and well rested today.” Looks like a happy accident to me.

kevingadd 6y ago

This is like the fourth time an iOS update has broken the ability to use your phone as an alarm clock. Incredibly frustrating. I definitely missed meetings a couple times back when I owned a first-gen iPhone and relied on it for this - I eventually bought an old-fashioned clock. FWIW I've had similar problems with other phones in the past, so this isn't exclusively an Apple thing - but insufficient QA of alarms is a distressing ongoing problem with iOS and I don't know why they haven't made sure that it's a core part of their release process by now. Unfortunately once you generalize all your notification infrastructure, it becomes easier to break alarms. The Windows Alarms and Clock app relies on system notification infrastructure, so if notifications are silenced (there is a longstanding bug that causes this, and the people responsible for Win10 Notifications don't give a shit), the alarm sound doesn't play until the notification appears - often hours later. If they played the sound directly this wouldn't be an issue, but they assume notifications will work. Yay for abstraction and infrastructure...

agumonkey 6y ago

we're entering digital brazilocene, featuring w3c-golderg machines

CGamesPlay 6y ago
Did you mean "brazil ocean"? https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=brazilocene&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=brazilo...
- agumonkey 6y ago
  no more like a portemanteau of brazil (the movie) and -cene, like anthropocene
- elcomet 6y ago
  I think brazilocene is a reference to the movie Brazil (mostly about bureaucracy), and "cene", which is a suffix to design a geological epoch (like Paleocene)

viach 6y ago

> I woke up late and well rested today. And as usually with iOS, the user experience is excellent!

Reason077 6y ago
There's a values conflict between the Health and Clock apps here. Clock wants you to wake up on time. Health wants you to sleep in!
- intricatedetail 6y ago
  It is a conflict between physical and mental health. If you sleep in you'll get anxiety about missed appointment and if you wake early you'll feel tired.
  - neuronic 6y ago
    It's a conflict between capitalism/modern performance society and being human. Of course, the common answer is drugs.
    - cultofmetatron 6y ago
      on my 3rd coffee as I read this. too real
      - csunbird 6y ago
        Technically, coffee is a drug :)
        411111111111111 6y ago
        That's was his point of it being too real...
    - de_watcher 6y ago
      I prefer insanity as an answer.

flemhans 6y ago

My alarm rang normally in the morning after my phone updated itself in the night.

kilroy123 6y ago
Same here. In fact, I was surprised when I woke up to realize it had updated over night.

rednum 6y ago

Eh, that's nothing, few friend of mine had issues where Android would sometimes not ring alerts. Why? Who knows, maybe some weird bug that manifested itself in some combination of system settings and phone firmware. I have multiple devices so I usually set alert on home phone + work phone if it's something really important like a flight at 6 AM; but if I were to use an alarm clock everyday I'd probably buy the simplest one I can find for few bucks.

waheoo 6y ago
Yea my android misses alarms all the damn time. Well, that's what my boss thinks anyway.
neutronicus 6y ago
I switched to WhatsApp from Hangouts because I stopped getting alerts when my wife messaged me on Hangouts. Tried for a while to resolve it, but, fuck it, WhatsApp just works
seventhtiger 6y ago
I stopped using Samsung's clock alarm for this reason. It's quite hard to figure out as a heavy sleeper whether actually only 1 of my 5 alarms went off or I was just sleeping through them. One day I just stared at the clock app, not ringing, as my alarm time came and went. At least validated all those times I've doubted myself. Downloaded AMDroid now. Much better, and much more customizable, and it turns out I never actually sleep through an alarm, they just never went off. I also got really good at multiplying 2-digit numbers in a sleep-daze.
- aitchnyu 6y ago
  My Samsung and now Nokia have gaslit me into long-term self-doubt if I sleep through alarms. In one near miss, I noticed the volume was lowered without my intention.
jabroni_salad 6y ago
I got bit by that twice and figured my old standard alarm clock would be good enough. Had it for 15 years and it has never missed a day. In industry, the more reliable you need something to be, the more simple it has to be. Phones are too complicated to be a good alarm clock. Plus I don't have to blast out my eyeballs to see what time it is in the dark.

Farbklex 6y ago

Ah, a disabled alarm. Classic. Let me tell you about my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 tablet. I always used a flip cover with a magnet which automatically puts the device in standby when it's closed. The tablet was always closed next to my bed as an alarm clock. After some time I noticed, that my alarm apparently didn't work. Turns out, that an update introduced a new feature: Closing the flip cover will automatically snooze the alarm. Problem is, that it also prevents an alarm from even starting, when the cover is already closed. Later they realized that it's a bug and disabled it again.

bartread 6y ago

iOS has had alarm issues for years. Sometimes my alarm will go off silently for no obvious reason (e.g., does not depend on whether phone is on silent or not - alarm should sound anyway). It happens so intermittently that I've never managed to figure out reproduction steps. Nevertheless, it's caused me problems enough times (missed trains to London, for example) that nowadays if it's really important for me to get up I'll always set a backup alarm on a different device (even a good old alarm clock). I really wish Apple would fix it.

woutr_be 6y ago
This happens to me so many times, sometimes I will wake up about 30 minutes after my alarm was supposed to go off. I've always wondered if I was somehow turning of my alarm while waking up and instantly falling back asleep or if my alarm just never went off.
wrycoder 6y ago
I updated to 13.7. I have the Bedtime alarm set for 7:30 AM. It went off at 3:00 AM the next morning. I’m pretty deaf, so awoke to my wife kicking and yelling at me. It took awhile to fumble it off. Why? And why 4 1/2 hours difference? In the morning, I screwed around with it for a bit and got it reset to 7:30. Or so I thought. It went off again at 3:00 PM. More screwing around. I suspect it’s somehow related to the fact I have the phone set for 24 hour time. Seems to be ok now, but I still have to update to 14.

pea 6y ago

One of my favourite things about the old blackberrys was that the alarm went off... even when the phone had 'run out' of battery! seriously awesome feature.

xiphias2 6y ago
Nokia 3310 had the same feature: you could turn it off, but the alarm was still working for weeks.
kilroy123 6y ago
Wow really? Did all of the models do that? I don't remember that feature.
- carlmr 6y ago
  Almost all the old phones i had did that, also my old Siemens.
netsharc 6y ago
It would be an interesting feature to add to the bootloader, just boot to beep (and maybe buzz, depending on how much battery is left).

FearNotDaniel 6y ago

The whole site is an amusing and satisfying read, mostly because it's reassuring to know I'm not the only person who is really bothered by these kind of little UI niggles. I particularly love the one where a German insurance provider insists on ignoring the point of the 'I' in 'IBAN': https://annoying.technology/posts/8b0e0f1083d21073/ https://annoying.technology/posts/8b0e0f1083d21073/ [For non-europeans: the first two characters of an International Bank Account Number are the ones that identify the country; if they really wanted to insist that only Germany-registered bank accounts are allowed, there are more intuitive ways to validate that.]

prox 6y ago
Does anyone know the daily WTF? http://thedailywtf.com/ http://thedailywtf.com/ It’s Error’d articles are so much fun, and have been going on for ages.
- corobo 6y ago
  Oh man I forgot about that site when I lost all my work bookmarks changing jobs! Think my favorite was the coal story http://thedailywtf.com/articles/special-delivery http://thedailywtf.com/articles/special-delivery Edit: The real daily wtf is that they're still on http
  - Kye 6y ago
    HTTPS works, but they don't do a redirect. https://thedailywtf.com/ https://thedailywtf.com/
    - corobo 6y ago
      I came in via search engine. If they're not redirecting then it might as well be off.
      - zrm 6y ago
        https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

person977777 6y ago

Apple knows better than you when your alarm should be activated. You were “holding the phone wrong”.

elramon 6y ago

and you took the time to write a post about this. wow

sillysaurusx 6y ago

This was a persistent problem in iOS 6 and made me late for work at least 5 times. Eventually I learned never to rely on iOS alarms.

toxik 6y ago

I do not trust smartphones for my wake up alarm, been bitten too many times. A simple battery driven one is just so much more reliable.

scarface74 6y ago

I just checked. I am on iOS 14 and it did migrate my sleep and wake time to the health app. Edit: The alarm went off at the appropriate time.

dutch3000 6y ago

New title - “I used beta software and found a bug”

dewey 6y ago
It's not beta software any more. The official public release was yesterday.

stemuk 6y ago

On iPadOS 14 the bedtime feature got removed entirely since there is no Health App available for iPads. I guess i have to say goodbye to using my iPad as a high tech alarm clock for now...

html5web 6y ago

Great story! My wife uses alarm, and I have to turn it off literally every day. I wish same thing happens for us, even once )))

Hnaomyiph 6y ago

I exclusively use the bedtime alarm and it did not disable itself for me. I only learned that it moved from the clock app to health app after it woke me up and I wanted to change the wake up time.

hnarn 6y ago
Same here, the "bedtime alarm" went off as normal this morning and it's what I use to wake up every morning. I updated to iOS 14 yesterday evening. I wonder what differs, maybe the model or some other factor like whether you have other alarms at all (even disabled).
- Hnaomyiph 6y ago
  "or some other factor like whether you have other alarms at all (even disabled)" This is the only thing I can think of as a reason why. I have no other active alarms, iPhone 6s. I think the actual annoying technology part would be that in my half-awake stupor I wasn't able to find that the bedtime alarm moved to the health app without Googling it. As searching "bedtime" in the app search bar still shows the old bedtime app and still launches you into the clock app.
- stinos 6y ago
  "bedtime alarm" ... it's what I use to wake up every morning Non-native English speaker here: doesn't bedtime refer to the time you go to bed, not the time you have to wake up? I mean, I was reading "bedtime alarm" and thought "so people these days use an alarm to tell them when to go to bad? crazy times" but then that shifted in "wait does an application use a rather confusing term for something as common as getting out of bed?"
  - hnarn 6y ago
    There’s two parts to the alarm and it isn’t consistently called “the bedtime alarm” by Apple to my knowledge. The first part is the “bedtime” alarm (it’s time to go to bed!) and the second part is the wake-up, which makes it slightly different in that and other ways from a normal alarm.

mrcnkoba 6y ago

I learnt this hard way. I never install version .0. They are usually full of bugs. The later, the better usually .2/3 should be fine.

dirtnugget 6y ago

I fell asleep before the update went through. Had a regular alarm set instead of bed time. It rang through despite the phone being SIM-locked and basically still in update mode.

joejohnson 6y ago

I also upgraded and it migrated my alarm and woke me up at my usual time... Also, the sleep alarm is still visible at the top of your alarms list in the Clock app. Not sure what the confusion is here.

josefrichter 6y ago

I'd understand one annoyed tweet to went your frustration. But an article? +Someone posting it to HN? +131 points as of now? Srsly?

mdavidn 6y ago
I think a bug that could impact everyone relying on the iOS alarm (including me) is newsworthy and useful.

Dirlewanger 6y ago

Pointless crap like this is what happens when you employ a team of UI designers full-time: PMs feel guilty about wasting their time so they give them pointless projects to "modernize" the UI and to make the product more "holistic" and they come back with completely unnecessary and frustrating changes like this. See also: the new reddit/YouTube designs.

martin-adams 6y ago

Back in the day when iOS couldn't handle daylight savings, I was driving onto the onramp for the motorway to get to work when my wakeup alarm went off. Not the first time this type of issue has happened, probably won't be the last.

Angostura 6y ago

Every beta I put in a feedback item saying that moving bedtime from Clock (where it was easily found) to the horror of trying to find it among heart rate data in Health was really grim Obvously took my reports to heart (heh)

projektfu 6y ago
I know, seems like a bad move. God forbid it’s accessible in both places.
rconti 6y ago
Health has taken a number of steps backwards. For one, you have to dig into various screens to find weight+body fat%, and then go into each item, click "Add data" and then back out to the next one if you want to update both at the same time.

atemerev 6y ago

The same thing happened with iOS 13. As an ADHD sufferer, I heavily depend on tens of alarms and reminders. Suffice to say it wasn't a good day for me, where all these were suddenly silent.

gjsman-1000 6y ago

This happened to me on iOS 14 a few times now, except the alarm still shows as enabled in the clock app. At least those days weren’t terribly important...

shazzzm 6y ago

For one of my first phone interviews, my motorola had a helpful feature where it would mute notifications during a calendar event. Since I'd put the interview in my calendar, it put the phone on silent so I missed the call!

Insanity 6y ago
Maybe that was a bug, wrongly promoted as a 'helpful feature' :).
bemmu 6y ago
My old Nokia phone had a few feature I discovered during my first class in front of a new professor. I turned off my phone at start of class, but little did I know that the Nokia will ring the morning alarm even if your phone is off. It was very loud in the quiet classroom, he gave me a look of “now I hate you”, and I didn’t even try to explain that actually, the phone is off.
- dogma1138 6y ago
  A few years ago I missed a very important work engagement because it discovered the opposite. The LG Nexus wouldn’t ring the alarm when the phone was set to silent. I literally had to show it to my manager which was furious.
- nixy 6y ago
  I had the exact same problem as a 12 year old kid, only I was in assembly where Auschwitz survivor Emerich Roth was telling us about his hardships. He stopped with annoyed patience and waited for me to silence the alarm before continuing. I don't think I've ever felt so bad.
  - FriendlyNormie 6y ago
    Don’t feel bad when you interrupt some lying Jew spewing his poison into the minds of all your peers. Your phone was the hero of the hour.
- 6y ago

booleandilemma 6y ago

This is why I always set 2 alarms on 2 different devices. It sucks, but I’ve been burned a few times now by an alarm not going off, for whatever reason.

slantyyz 6y ago
I do the same, sometimes with more than 2 devices depending on the importance of the alarm. Every time I read about an alarm bug, it makes me think about the iPhone New Year's Day alarm bug that caused a couple to miss their fertility treatments[1]. That story made me so sad, because anyone who has been through that process knows how important timing is, and how expensive the entire process is. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120604024148/http://consumerist.com/2011/01/iphone-alarm-bug-makes-couple-miss-fertility-treatment.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120604024148/http://consumeris...

exabrial 6y ago

Why is silicon valley getting more passive aggressive and hostile? Now dismissal dialogs day "maybe later" instead "no thanks", and product features are becoming non optional opt ins like this. Stop and think before you implement something like this and push back on your boss.

codydh 6y ago
I think sometimes less confident users see a "No Thanks" as "Not Ever," and are worried they'll disable something. "Maybe Later" communicates the choice isn't permanent and they can come back to it later if they want.
- userbinator 6y ago
  I see "Maybe Later" as "we'll force it on you sooner or later", because that's what it often means in reality.
- exabrial 6y ago
  then there should be three options: 0) Yes. 1) No means no. 2) Not right now

dryfish 6y ago

I clicked update at bedtime thinking this would happen but then I forgot about it. This post has reminded me and I'm surprised that my alarm did actually go off this morning.

ebg13 6y ago

> Unfortunately the migration is done by disabling your existing alarm and showing a button to open the Health app to set it up again. I think this is wrong. My alarm worked fine this morning. Knowing what we know about how people behave in their sleep, it seems likely that they might have just turned their alarm off at the right time without fully waking up. I've done that in the past.

javajosh 6y ago

Well, this is what happens when your mind is a bicycle for your computer.

WesolyKubeczek 6y ago

Annoyed because woke up well rested. Kids these days and their priorities.

prawn 6y ago

I can't remember if it was iOS/OSX or something else, but I had a situation where I'd backed up my device before migrating to new hardware, set an alarm, then restored to the new device from the backup. Of course, the backup predated the alarm being set, so it never went off on the new device. Took me a while to realise why...

timvisee 6y ago

iOS not ringing set alarms. This has happened before.

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hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

I think this is also a good example of how "smart" technology is infinitely more fragile than "dumb" technology. I had a similar issue way back in the day with the first iPhone, where there was a bug if you had something pop up with a modal alert in the middle of the night the alarm wouldn't go off because only one modal at a time was allowed. I've had a couple similar experiences since, and because of that I always set a simple "dumb" alarm clock whenever I have something important I need to get up for. It has literally never had an issue, simply works exactly how I want it, every time.

buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
Exactly. One time my father in law had a bunch of people over to watch an outdoor movie on his new projector. For sounds, he got a Bose smart sound bar with a few companion speakers that connect to it wirelessly. There wasn't a wire in sight besides the power cord. Well, needless to say, there were sound issues because each individual speaker needed to be connected to the wi-fi, which wasn't great because we were out in the back yard. Almost ruined the whole night. Luckily I had a 100ft ethernet cable and we were able to move the router out to the backyard. It fixed the issue, but only after an hour long delay. I couldn't help but think how much nicer it would have been to just have some good old fashion dumb speakers connected with speaker wire to a receiver.
- m463 6y ago
  I've seen this same scenario happen so many times with: - trying to start a video conference without installing anything - trying to share a screen - heck, trying to start a videoconference at all - hooking laptop to projector at a conference
- fomine3 6y ago
  The incident shows importance of testing.
thewebcount 6y ago
I've had issues with dumb alarm clocks. Power goes out or batteries die and the alarm doesn't go off. Analog alarm clocks can only be turned on < 12 hours in advance and I'd often forget. Even waking up to the sun coming up fails when it's cloudy. But I agree those failure modes are less common than what we get with network-connected digital everything.

darrmit 6y ago

I did not experience this. My iOS Bedtime alarm went off as expected even though it was moved to Health (and I didn't notice until seeing this article).

cpach 6y ago

I don’t think this bug would affect me since I have lots of redundancy for my mourning routines: 15 alarms on my private iPhone, 5 alarms on my work iPhone and one alarm on my physical alarm clock. YMMV. (Yeah that setup is a tad bit excessive but I find it useful when needing to catch the train at 06:25.)

diebeforei485 6y ago
OS updates aside, you should look into a smartwatch haptic alarm. Those are quiet and very effective, and audio-based alarms (alarm clock or phone) can act as a backup.
- cpach 6y ago
  Cool! So far I haven’t jumped on the smartwatch train though. Perhaps in the future :)

kuon 6y ago

I think the best thing about being a freelance is that I can have the luxury of not having an alarm and I wake up when I wake up. I put all my meeting with customers in the afternoon. Since I stopped having an alarm in the morning, I'm much happier in my life, less tired, less stressed, and in the end I can do more work.

dylan604 6y ago
I got a cat about this time last year. I haven't needed an alarm clock since.
- toast0 6y ago
  Just FYI, as a long time cat owner. An alarm clock cat will be a reliable alarm clock, except when you have a very important meeting when it will let you sleep. Either because it's emotionally connected to you, and senses you were nervous and having bad sleep and didn't want to disturb you, or becauae it's a cat and thought it would be fun to mess with you. If you have a good cat was supposed to wake me up story when you make it to the meeting, your very important clients will laugh and be amused. You won't get this contract, but you'll be considered for future ones.

xlii 6y ago

Interestingly enough, nothing like this happened to me, and I'm using exact same features as OP. Bad luck I guess. However, it reminds me about some other situation that I'd like to share as it amuse me to this day. Some time ago I was traveling to my clients city. I was provided with a flat of one of coworkers who - at the same time was delegated elsewhere. So that was kind of AirBnB but it was all "paid" by company (in a way, that he got compensation and I had place to stay). I went to sleep fairly late and barely shut my eye when at 2am his Android tablet started to ring. I have no idea what was up with it, was it default alarm or some custom one, but there was no way for me to disable it. None of the physical buttons worked and every touch interaction spawned the lock screen through which I couldn't get past. On top of it, the sound was getting louder and louder. It didn't ring for 20 minutes when the police came knocking. Someone complained about the noise. I said that the device isn't mine and I'm only taking care of friend's flat and that there is nothing I can do about it. Showed device to them, we fiddled together with it but couldn't turn it off neither. Police wanted to hand me a ticket, but that wasn't easy. I was foreigner so they had to collect on spot. Once they confirmed that they decided to not make me any troubles and asked me to try and to muffle the tablet. After 3h of constant noise it seemed like device decided to stop ringing by itself. Since I was awake full night, I took day of and notified the client that it's either hotel for me or I'm going back home, cause I decline to be in the same place as the dreaded device to which they agreed. That almost was the end of the story, but week later I learned it wasn't end of it. Coworker, the owner of the device (who refused to provide me with the code, since it can't be that bad), came back to his door which kicked out by the firefighters. It seemed like neighbors called the police again day/days later. Police couldn't get in but they heard the alarm so they called the firefighters who assuming that one of the smoke alarm went off decided to break in to find only ringing tablet. To this day I rather not being woken up than suffer through the Alarm from Hell.

blkhawk 6y ago
protip: holding down the power button will kill all android devices after 10-ish seconds.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

carlmr 6y ago

It happened a few times already that my Huawei (P20 and P30) loaded a software update at night and then got stuck at Pin entry, before loading alarms. I'm wondering if the sim cards in other countries don't have a pin.

qz2 6y ago

This is annoying me. It’s simply too complicated now. We’ve gone past the realms of deterministic behaviour into some undefinable benefit which requires administration and understanding past “wake me up then” I’m going to buy an alarm clock and leave the phone on my desk.

Normille 6y ago

Ironic that a blog dedicated to annoying technology is illustrated with countless screengrabs, many of which are too small to be able to read what is displayed on them. So I clicked on one of the images, expecting it to open a larger [more legible] version... [Normille was annoyed on 17 September.]

dewey 6y ago
Thanks for the feedback, in 99% of the cases what's written there is not important though.

earthboundkid 6y ago

Ha, I literally did not update to iOS 14 last night because I figured it would mess up the alarm.

Dumblydorr 6y ago

I used an old windows phone that had a full qwerty keyboard and the horizontal screen slid up over it, really old design from around 2007. Well, this phone was a terrible alarm, because it literally went to Sleep itself. Upon first getting it, I ran into my physics exam that was 75% done and had to explain that both my phone AND I overslept.

m1117 6y ago

My alarm on Pixel stopped working one day and just is silent. Maybe I did something with settings, maybe it's broken, I have no idea.

whalesalad 6y ago

Get a dog. My dogs can tell time so well that I hardly even look at a clock all day long. Waking up, breakfast, mid-day worktime breaks, dinner and bed are all pre-planned!

jcadam 6y ago

I still have a basic alarm clock with a battery for back-up. Back when I was in the Army and oversleeping carried somewhat harsher consequences, I also had a mechanical wind-up clock as a backup. I would absolutely never trust a software-controlled device as complex as a smartphone to wake me up in the morning. If I'm traveling on business, I'll set the room alarm clock and also request a wake up call from the front desk.

tzs 6y ago
I still have a mechanical wind-up alarm clock, a Westclox Baby Ben. It is my longest owned possession, except possibly for some books. Even if I go over a decade between occasions where I use it, it still works.

rad_gruchalski 6y ago

"I woke up late and well rested today." So all in all, it's good. No?

outside1234 6y ago

And so it begins. Thank you all for testing the OS for when I install it in three months.

gfiorav 6y ago

I left it updating overnight. The alarm went off as expected. I was surprised!

johnhenry 6y ago

> I woke up late and well rested today. Sometimes life gives us gifts in the form of grievances.

tiffanyh 6y ago

TLDR: "my $1,200 alarm clock didn't work as expected" :)

Zelphyr 6y ago

I'm genuinely worried about Apple now. It seemed to me that, for the most part, they had avoided the "change for change's sake" mentality that is rampant in the tech industry. Moving Bedtime to Health is clearly that. Sure, it could have easily lived in Health just as much as it could live in the Clock app. I can't think if a real reason to move it wholesale, though. Other apps can share data with the Health app, why not Clock? All because some PM at Apple thought, "I gotta change something or they won't think I'm doing anything."

Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago
My guess is that the new sleep tracking features are a part of health (not clock, where they would be out of place). Since bedtime is also sleep related, it got moved to health as well. Doesn't seem like change for change's sake at all.

hcarvalhoalves 6y ago

I still wear a cheap Casio G-Shock. I learned to not rely on phones for time keeping, alarms, etc. A device that constantly runs out of battery is too unreliable for that. An update breaking the alarm is just the cherry on top.

greggman3 6y ago

I run into a few iOS bugs often. Today, 3 times today alone, I paused audio (tap on airpod) and then 5 minutes later tap to resume, nope, tap again, nope, tap harder! nope, tap harder again angry now that the damn phone isn't effing working, unlock phone, audio starts :( Another I run into often, especially with face masks on, is trying to unlock with a code and how iOS, for lack of a better way to describe it, has an input buffer. Let's say your code is 123456 and by accident you enter 1123456. It will error at 112345 but it will register the 6 so when the error finishes I quickly enter 123456 which it sees as 612345 (error) with a buffered 6, so repeat two or three more times getting angrier and frustrated that the EFFING phone won't unlock. Finally stop, delete the buffered 6 and enter 123456. There's absolutely no good reason to buffer the 6 that happened 1/2 a second ago (or whatever the error delay is) IMO. I have a feeling the new "smart home screen" is going to really suck with it's AI trying to surface apps for you meaning you can never know where to find an app. This seems so antithetical to everything Apple wrote about UI design in the 80s and 90s. I know app ABC is on the first screen 3rd row on the left. App DEF is on the second screen 2nd row on the right. But no longer, now, at ever time of the day, at least according to the iOS 14 ad here https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/09/ios-14-is-available-today/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/09/ios-14-is-available-t... the icons will move at different times of the day on the whim of the OS. That sounds like hell to me

Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago
The "Smart Home Screens" (actually called "App Library") is a totally optional feature. You make it sound like the phone will just start moving your apps for no reason (which it won't do).
marnett 6y ago
> Another I run into often, especially with face masks on, is trying to unlock with a code and how iOS, for lack of a better way to describe it, has an input buffer. I know exactly what you are referring to and to this day it dumbfounds me this UX has not been fixed. It is an abysmal experience.
alasdair_ 6y ago
My personal favorite is an old iOS bug that I ended up going through a super-convoluted process to report and that they finally fixed. The bug was extremely simple: the calculator app would ignore the decimal point depending on whether the phone was held vertically or horizontally. Steps to reproduce: 1. Open the calculator application 2. Ensure the app is held vertically (non-scientific mode) 3. Enter a number such as 10,000,000 4. Attempt to make the number 10,000,000.1 by pressing "." and "1" 5. Notice that instead of this number, the calculator application converts the input to 100,000,001 - i.e. the decimal point was ignored. I wouldn’t have minded, except I only discovered the bug during a finance final in grad school, and It took me three attempts before thinking “maybe the calculator is wrong”... Bug id 6743558 for posterity :)

sigzero 6y ago

No, you overslept because you didn't make sure you alarm was set.

dewey 6y ago
The point of technology is to make life easier, if I'd have to check every time that everything is done correctly I might as well use a manual alarm I have to set.

heavenlyblue 6y ago

There is also a bug in iOS that disables the sound of alarm/timer from time to time. The alarm goes off with the screen showing the alarm but no sound at all. In my case it usually reappears every month or so and is only fixed by rebooting. It’s not related to system sounds because I had checked the alarm settings a few times Wondering if it’s only me.

jaimex2 6y ago

Classic Apple

simonblack 6y ago

We have a fridge with a third drawer that can be configured as either 'fridge' or 'freezer'. It has a 'Lock' to prevent the configuration from being changed accidentally. We had ours set (and locked) to be in 'freezer' mode. Yesterday, we turned off the electricity for a few moments to do some work. Later that day, I felt some frozen bread in that drawer and discovered that it was starting to thaw. By turning off the electricity, we had reset the mode to 'fridge', even though all of the other temperature settings in the fridge maintained their previous configuration. Why did all of the other settings remain, but that one didn't? Such annoying technology.

blackrock 6y ago

Is it obvious to anyone, that to disable the alarm, you must press the home button? However, the snooze button is on the screen, as a big red button. But yet, the disable command is a small hyperlink text? And you’re somehow supposed to accurately hit this small text, while you’re half asleep? Unless of course, you knew that you can also hit the home button. Another stupid design from the Apple design team.

abhinavkumars 6y ago

You are correct the bedtime alarm was disabled by sleep it is buggy on iOS14