If you’ve slept through an important meeting or missed your alarm lately, it may not be entirely your fault if you’re an iPhone user. For weeks now, iPhone users have been reporting on social media that their devices are no longer ringing.
Today, The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern finally confirmed this. According to Stern, Apple has confirmed that it’s aware of the issue causing some alarms not to play a sound and is working on a fix.
iPhone alarm issues explained
The iPhone alarm problem seems to be tied to Apple’s Attention Aware features. For those unfamiliar, it’s a feature that lowers the volume sound of your alerts and alarms if you’re looking at your device and avoids dimming the screen, similar to how Samsung phones keep the screen on if they see you looking at your screen.
According to 9to5Mac, social media users are speculating that Attention Aware is incorrectly detecting attention and lowering the volume of alarms, even when the iPhone isn’t actively being used. Apple hasn’t confirmed that this is true, but it sounds fairly reasonable on the face of it.
How to fix iPhone alarm problems
The easiest and quickest way to fix this issue until Apple rolls out a fix is to disable Attention Aware. To do this, go into Settings > Face ID & Passcode, then turn off the Attention Aware Features toggle.
If the bug is tied to an implementation of Attention Aware, this should help you avoid the issue. We recommend testing your alarms after doing this to make sure they’re working. If all else fails, you might need to stick to the tried and true old-school alarm clock.
It’s unclear when exactly Apple will issue a fix for the alarm issue, but fingers crossed it’s sooner rather than later. If the company is already aware of what’s going on, it shouldn’t be too much longer. Otherwise, you may have to have an awkward conversation with your boss about why you were late to work.
