I overslept because iOS 14 disabled my alarm | Hacker News Reader

I overslept because iOS 14 disabled my alarm

annoying.technology

496 pointsdewey316 comments

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.

protip: holding down the power button will kill all android devices after 10-ish seconds.

power + volume down is a hard off for most hardware that uses radios (tablets, mobiles).

You don't need to press down the volume button on Android.

I'm curious, what's the significance of using radios here? What's the correlation between having a radio and supporting that interaction? It just feels weird to me to think of a majority of hardware companies going "Well, this device has a radio, so I guess we need to add power+volume down as a shutoff trigger".

Not disputing what you said is true, just curious of the origins!

In most radio contexts it's used for doing a debug log... in case of a hard lock. If you do it on an Android device (depending on settings), it generates an error log and memory dump then cuts power to the chip. It's an old carry-over from radio testing (Former RF Validation Engineer here)

I have never heard of a decice - iOS, Android, or otherwise, that had an alarm that couldn't be toggled off through the lock screen. What kind of awful alarm app was he using!?

A lot of alarms can be configured to have barriers that prevent you from easily turning them off. The idea is it forces you to mentally engage and wake up a bit.

It might be the lock screen, simple or difficult math problems, visual puzzles, etc. Until you solve it, it won’t turn off the alarm.

It’s a neat idea until this happens, I guess.

My favorite was the physical alarm clock that would launch a propeller across your bedroom. The only way to turn off the alarm was to find the propeller and put it back on the base.

I was initially thinking Clocky, but Clocky was an alarm on wheels.

I don't think the propeller one had any name beyond "flying alarm clock" or somesuch, and the failure mode seems way worse: if the propeller shoots out an open window or wedges itself behind furniture you're hosed.

Plus finding a small propeller in the dark corners of your room while just woken up seems way too stressful a task, frankly.

I have a friend who had a dorm in college with 3 other guys, and all of them had problems waking up to alarm clocks. They each had an alarm clock that they placed in a different part of the room, so each of them would have to get up to shut it off. One day they discovered that they overslept, each of the 4 clocks had been turned off but nobody remembered doing it.

I swear I've posted this before:

I used to have a job that required me to be up at 4 or 5am. I am not a morning person, and this requirement was equivalent to a normal person being told they need to write their weekly sales reports using a pencil taped to their knee. Or something.

Anyway, I had this early wake up time, but a problem with shutting my alarm off without actually waking up.

So I took a normal alarm clock, cracked it open, and soldered a 5m length of speaker wire to the circuit board. I drilled a hole in my headboard and mounted an external speaker there. The alarm clock itself was placed in a backpack, with the zippers tied together with a key ring, and the whole thing stuffed in my closet.

So each morning, I was forced to get out of bed, go to the closet, fiddle with the key ring to separate the 2 zippers, then finally turn the alarm off.

I had roommates at the time; they weren't very happy with me. But they were my brother and a good friend, so to hell with them :)

Imagining this story from their perspective paints a pretty bad picture of you.

Don’t worry, OP left out the plot twist where they got a huge payday from that job. Their siblings forgave them and they’re now living it up in a sweet mansion in Hawaii.

Everything you wrote is true, except the huge payday and the mansion in Hawaii.

Nah, the plot twist was that we were all in our early 20s, and had mismatched schedules. Whatever annoyance my morning routine caused was matched with their late nights partying when I had work the next morning.

And I got pretty quick about silencing that alarm. (And getting a better job.)

There's a great way to get added to a national watch list if the deconstructed alarm innards were found or you were googling some specific keywords for the pin out schematics lol

I bought through Kickstarter a Ramos alarm clock which requires entering a code through a separate keypad (defaulting to MMDD) to turn it off. Unplugging the alarm clock doesn't turn it off. The only options are to turn it off before it goes off or enter the code.

After my kids were born, I stopped using it because we didn't want to wake up the kids (I've had my phone on silent mode for the last six and a half years now). All was well and good until one day the cleaning lady apparently turned the alarm on and I didn't notice. The alarm went off in the morning and I went to the keypad in the bathroom to turn off the alarm—and the batteries in it had died. I ended up taking the alarm clock to the basement and wrapping it in a towel until the battery backup gave up.

That's funny. If I had heard about that product when it was announced, I probably would have backed it.

I used to use an iOS app called FreakyAlarm. It had all sorts of features to enforce wake up time. You could set it to just require that you solve a math problem, or move the hands on an analog clock to "28/4:(36+15)" (Meaning, move the hour hand to 7 and the minute hand to 51.), and all sorts of "games" that you're unlikely able to do in a half-asleep state.

But my favorite was the barcode scanner. You scanned a random UPC (I chose my shaving cream), and in the morning the alarm would not shut off until you went and scanned it again. But that got me in trouble once when I was on a business trip, and didn't pack that particular brand of shaving cream.

Of course it's just an iOS app, so you can force quit it and uninstall it faster than doing any of the tasks. But I preferred honor to cheating that way.

I don't use any alarm clock anymore. I have dogs. They're remarkably consistent.

A bit tangential, but I had a tendency to just sleep through my alarm. I ended up getting an alarm called "The Earthquake", or some similar cliche. It had a module that you'd stick under your sheets or mattress and would violently vibrate when the alarm went off.

I quickly learned how to disable an alarm while groggy instead of sleeping straight through it.

This happened to me on an earlier release years ago.

Personally, I always update in August to the betas. I’ll take the new features with the bugs.

yeesh. I'd have just thrown it into the freezer, or if that didn't work, I'd have filled the bath and put it in there!

I've had my own "alarm from hell" situations, mostly with smoke detectors (one was in a room with vaulted ceilings in a house with only stepstools. I had to build a mountain of furniture at 4am!) I understand the frustration and rage.

I am convinced that fire alarm batteries only go flat at 4 am.

Perhaps it was a "locate lost device" situation?

I find it hard to believe you couldn't engineer a solution to muffle the sound. Assuming holding down the power button to turn it off didn't work (like, you know, every other phone and tablet ever) you could shove it under your mattress, in the freezer, put it in a ziploc and submerge it in the tub/sink, go throw it in the trunk of your car, stick it in a parcel and mail it to the owner...

Or since it's already a while back when headphone jacks were still a thing, plug in your headphones. Although they might take damage from that sound

Headphones don’t make a difference on iOS, both the external speaker and the headphones play the alarm. This might be the case for Android too.

Headphones don't work for alarms iirc

Yes, that’s true, however I was sleep deprived, after day long trip and I wasn’t at my top intellectual game at the moment. Also this wasn’t hotel room but instead coworkers flat which wasn’t prepared for guests. I literally was given a couch with a blanket. It wasn’t supposed to be like that nor I was supposed to stay there a lot since we worked pretty much 8-22 following days.

So yeah, it’s unbelievable story about my inaptitude at that moment. Could I handled it better? Yeah, probably. But usually stuff like this is matter of chaotic circumstances.

Police officers couldn’t turn it off neither and they fiddled with it for a 3 minutes or something like that so it’s not like I was the only one who failed ;)

I always think of this in these situations:

https://xkcd.com/530/

For what it's worth, holding down the power button no longer guarantees you're gonna shut down the device. On the iPhone X (at least, maybe earlier models, maybe later), you have to hold down a combination. It doesn't take long to figure out, but it's a really stupid change.

Is there a list of devices anywhere for which this doesn't work?

It's worked in anything I've tried (haven't tried latest iphones) with only a momentary power switch on it. I was under the impression it was some kind of legal requirement somewhere, and that's why it was so standard.

I seem to recall one update that flip flooped snooze and stop on the alarm. That ruined a week.

Alarm from Hell === Alarm from Earth

You were sleeping on a pillow right? Shove tablet fully between two pillows or seat cushions on floor, place a table leg over it to absorb any sound and put heavy stuff on top of the table.

Problem solved.

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!

Maybe that was a bug, wrongly promoted as a 'helpful feature' :).

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.

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.

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.

I remember my first Android phone would (I was not aware at the time) keep the alarms turned on even while in silent mode.

During the final exam of my calculus course, which takes place through two class sessions, my alarm went off to remind me of my second class session. Despite the professor promising to tear up our exams up if our phones made any noise or appearance the hour before, I'm assuming he ignored it because I was literally the only person in class that made any attempt at engaging with his lectures. Unrelated, I had also completely given up studying for the exam since I knew I was going to fail and had plans to retake the course (but be at least present to take mental notes on the final), but he clearly bumped me up to a minimally passing grade for what I can only assume was the same reason.

Meh, I was a mediocre Calc student and walked out of the final feeling like I'd utterly bombed it, but had the same prof for Calc II and apparently I'd managed a solid B on the final so something had stuck.

That's too bad, but I can't help to think that it's a nice feature.

I recently sat through an hour-long "Continuing Legal Education" webinar and, in order to get CLE credit, they need to confirm you're paying attention. About 40 minutes in I got a pop-up with a 30 second timer: "Please confirm your attendance" with two buttons "yes" and "no".

Well I actually was paying attention to the presentation and I instinctively hit "no" so that I could see the content again.

Guess who didn't get credit for attending?

Why.... why would there be a no button

Off the cuff, a better user experience altogether might be to prompt attendees afterwards to submit their biggest take-away, instead of a patronizing poke.

That way, not only does it confirm paying attention, but you can also get a signal of course effectiveness.

Proof-of-work really is a nice system

It's like the old joke about the rookie cop who's too nervous to investigate a big spooky warehouse at night. He shouts into the darkness "is anybody here?"

A few seconds later, he hears a voice say "......no". So he relaxes with a sigh, and goes to report the all clear to his superior.

That's pretty funny, and would be better without the old "blonde" trope. I forgot that was ever a thing.

You think so? I thought joke culture says you need to pick a pre-approved reason to explain dumbness. I changed it to "rookie".

To make sure you're paying attention and not just clicking buttons at random on the screen, of course!

If I had to guess, it's because the programmer couldn't find out (soon enough) how to do another kind of dialogue box and then went with the standard yes/no but then didn't look up how to handle "no" and assumed everyone would do "yes".

If I had to guess it's probably because not everyone attending the webinar needs CLE credits reported. I can imagine people intentionally selecting no if they're not an attorney or if they're licensed in a jurisdiction that doesn't require it.

Or perhaps it's to teach the most valuable CLE of all - too hasty a response risks a critical mistake. I can't even recall the specific topic of the webinar but I definitely learned a lesson!

Similarly, on the iPhone, there's that switch on the side that silences it, but I've been burned by not realizing it that hides the existence of a phone call and sends it straight to voicemail, and only later alerts me that it happened at all.

Edit: it doesn't seem to do that anymore, but it definitely did at least twice, when I didn't have DND on.

It shouldn’t do this. You can go to Settings -> Phone -> Silence Unknown Callers, which will send callers not in your contacts to voicemail, but the silencer simply mutes audio. It still vibrates and receives calls. Or maybe there’s something I’m missing?

Well, it did do that. I checked, and that setting is off.

Almost like Apple products can have unintended bugs like disabling your alarm on OS update.

Easy now. I didn’t say it didn’t do it, I said it shouldn’t do it. You made it sound like you thought this was what was supposed to happen, and I just wanted to help you out.

Edit: Apologies if the last sentence in my first message seemed rude. Not my intention.

You must have it on do not disturb. I exclusively keep my phone on silent (but within view) and have no problems answering calls because it pops up on the screen.

No, it wasn't on that at the times it happened.

That's weird, that's not the case for me. Mine still goes through the length of ringing with the call on the screen.

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/

[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.]

Does anyone know the daily WTF? http://thedailywtf.com/

It’s Error’d articles are so much fun, and have been going on for ages.

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

Edit: The real daily wtf is that they're still on http

HTTPS works, but they don't do a redirect.

https://thedailywtf.com/

I came in via search engine. If they're not redirecting then it might as well be off.

https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

Yeah. I'm concerned that a malicious actor might MITM their site and serve content that's less funny.

It's a "wtf", not the end of the world. Cheers for the snark tho

It is for your protection.

It is possible someone may post something like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funniest_Joke_in_the_World

which may disable the editors and be accidentally posted, leading to your death or dismemberment.

http allows for government monitoring of this type of situation and possible automated interdiction.

That is an astounding webpage. I haven't had even one ten thousandth as many problems with my Linux machines as he's had with OSX.

As funny as it sounds, but that's called IBAN discrimination. It's illegal but there is no fine.

There is an article in the German Wikipedia about this: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBAN-Diskriminierung

You can put in a complaint here: https://www.wettbewerbszentrale.de/de/beschwerdestelle/sepah...

See also https://grumpy.website/

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.

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.

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?

It will ask again. At least it did for me.

They are handled equally. Both prompts whenever they want to access your photos.

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.

Whoa. What iOS apps do this?

> 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?

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-an...

WhatsApp and some others keep trying to access photos, because I keep getting an prompt asking me if I want to choose more photos every so often even when I'm not trying to do anything with photos.

Many apps including Discord repeatedly snoop the clipboard/pasteboard even when I don't paste anything, and wouldn't know about if iOS 14 didn't alert me.

Then there's the major apps secretly accessing the camera and microphone, exposed by the green/orange indicator light in iOS 14:

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/07/25/instagram-unexpectedly-...

Surprise, these are the people fighting against Apple.

I noticed you can also just share your approximate location, rather than your exact location. Therefore, as an example, weather apps where my exact location isn't necessary won't get it.

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.

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.

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.

Or why don't they bother considering they broke the morning alarms now what... 4 times at least? (DST, new year, now this)

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?

I only feel locked in to Apple because I despise Google so much and the 2 Android phones I previously had were complete garbage. If there was a another viable option, I would go with it in a second.

Did you try a recent clean Android like Pixel or Oneplus or was your last Android experience some bloated 2016 era Samsung?

If one despises Google, buying a Google phone would be the least optimal solution.

The extremely deep integration with google services was always annoying for me. I'm still finding it hard to untangle myself now that I've fully moved to Apple devices.

My older smartphone (few years old) had less Google-related stuff. And for one, it had its own goddamn music player. Can you imagine? I did not have to use Google Play by default, and go to the Play Store to download a fscking music player. A music player!

Google Play Music graduated Google anyway, and is going to be killed soon...

It doesn't matter so much now, but I don't want them cluttering up my phone's rom with default apps I might not like, or that I can't take with me to a new phone. An ideal Android for me would come out of the box with a dialer (preferably AOSP), clock, keyboard, launcher, AOSP Browser, and a play store stub (play store might not be ideal, but it's the path of least effort).

Yeah, of course. It is a sad state of the store that I had to go through a few music players before I found one that did not shove ads in my face (or at all), and had all the basic functions you would expect a music player to have.

My similar feelings towards Apple ("despise" would probably be too strong, but I don't really like them either, plus I'm too cheap to put up with their prices) means that I am pretty much locked in to Android, but there I at least have a choice between different manufacturers...

It’s nowhere near universal. I read this article before my wake up time. I installed iOS 14 last night. The alarm worked.

I've been running 14 beta for a couple months. Never had this problem either.

QA is becoming an endangered species. As a software engineer I despise that my end users are my beta testers. Only a handful of times in my career have I had the luxury of a QA team and they were worth their weight in gold.

Of course business doesn't care, all they see is cost centers. Who cares if the bug count is 10,000 or 200, right?

Bugs are only urgent if management's reporting to even higher management is jeopardized.

I once had a manager that, when asked why we don’t hire a QA team, said, “We don’t need one because we have really good engineers”. :/

"Why do you need breaks? We have really good engines."

Or my favorite: "We don't need QA because we have unit tests!"

My post on kicking the can to the extreme: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9775799

My theory is that companies like Apple and Google - and, actually, smaller businesses even more so, because they can't afford a QA team - have intentionally offloaded much of the QA phase to the public.

In a way, it's a result of the "agile" approach, to "release early, ship often". And the larger the userbase, the more effective they are at finding and reporting bugs and edge cases. It also cuts down on the cost by reducing the time/effort spent on testing new features thoroughly.

What grinds my gears is when a company doesn't have a centralized bug database where the users can contribute and see the progress being made. If I recall correctly, Apple's support forums are like a blackhole of issue reports. Most of the time it's a bunch of users with the same problem, trying to solve it on their own; no input from an employee/developer; no way to know if they're aware or working on the bug; and no clear path to a solution.

I'd go the other way for big organizations like Apple and Google -- they need to do public testing, because the bug that impacts 0.1% of their users will impact hundreds of thousands. And no QA team, regardless of how they're empowered or resourced, will find every 0.1% bug (or even every 1% bug). You need broad beta testing in those cases, just to get enough hands on.

There is a need for public betas, but a private QA team could catch a lot of bugs before release, and catch regressions. The public beta builds might not be much better, but they'd likely at least come with reported known issues.

Of course, iOS was nototorious for not alarming on January 1st because Steve wanted to sleep in (actually I don't know why, but I think it happened at least 2 years in a row, and maybe three)

This is one of the big questions! When is it "enough" testing?

When I can set my alarm for Airport or $VERY_IMPORTANT_MEETING and I know it will surely ring in the morning.

This seems like a problem we solved a very very long time ago, but today you're never really sure you'll get woken up on time.

The amish have the right idea.

Given that "Unfortunately the migration is done by disabling your existing alarm and showing a button to open the Health app to set it up again." this sounds more like improperly specified behavior than poorly implemented behavior to me. Unfortunately bad specifications aren't really caught in QA testing because that's what you're testing to. This probably should have been caught in beta testing, but the author might have a rare set of conditions that resulted in this behavior. Good beta testing is basically only done by have a really large userbase of testers. That said if apple wanted to improve this they probably have the capital to incentivize it through service discounts or something similar.

It’s probably a very rare combination of specific factors that caused this bug for this person. My iPhone alarm had no problems whatsoever this morning after installing iOS 14 last night. Your comment would be more applicable if we had reason to believe that they had simply completely broken the alarm feature and that no one at Apple had bothered testing it.

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...

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.

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".

Higher than what? I respectfully disagree:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090414133729/http://tomkarpik....

> 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.

It’s not awful at all. I installed it yesterday on my iPhone X and I’ve had no problems. I also have the exact same alarm setup and my alarm worked fine. It’s unrealistic to expect there to be literally zero bugs for zero people, and of course the people who do experience bugs will post about it online, but that doesn’t really give a statistically meaningful impression of how reliable iOS 14 is.

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.

On the thread about the update yesterday hundreds were coming out of the woodworks to say how totally fine this update was haha.

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.

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.

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.

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

The incident shows importance of testing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I quit all noisy apps before doing presentations. It's a healthy habit.

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.

That's a great idea!

It's how Microsoft Teams works, not my idea!

That's how Teams works and if I remember rightly even Skype for business/Lync had this way back.

Yes, that was the default behavior in Lync/SfB, but could be changed to not go into "Do Not Disturb" status when sharing your screen or presenting slides.

Don’t all apps nowadays send you notifications even if they are not running?

I believe such a horrible misfeature would require support from desktop environment. I mostly use XFCE and believe it doesn't have that feature. I'm not so sure, but believe that Windows is also mostly fine: note that an app minimized to tray is still running, "Quit" is distinct from "Close". Did I miss something in popular desktop environments?

If your job (as I've seen recently) is to give real time support it looks pretty nuts. Traditional landline telephones just ring loud and long enough to just work. In 2020 the laptop needs to be kept awake, the mail client has to be active, the wifi has to be connected. Woah, Reboot? just like that? I might get fired!

Then, in the middle of the daily 8 hour tech paranoia she went to the toilet and the mail notifier was loud- but not long enough. It got flushed pretty much. I had to tell her she got an email. "WOAH? Really??" :rolleyes:

The false alarms are also comical. Things like separate notification settings for different mail accounts is still a puzzle while it should be a simple filter settings. We got volume control in software but we didn't get to adjust it on a per feature-basis.

I guess we are back at: 'Jack of all trades, master of none'

One of the most annoying and bad-taste shocking developments in OS X was when they changed the Messages app so that it still gives you notifications even if its not running, unless you deliberately enable Do Not Disturb.

It's really really glaring and galling how bad that choice is. It's Microsoftian.

The notifications aren't coming from the Messages app anymore, they are push notifications that are delivered over APNS.

Maybe the issue isn't with the default notification behaviour in a teleconference program, but with the expectation that someone should always be instantly accessible via zoom/slack/what have you during work hours.

(I mean, yeah, the meeting was presumably scheduled but the manager could have phoned or texed.)

In some places they even push the expectation of being accessible immediately at any time ("being on call"), and it’s not paid hours. Crazy times we live in.

who doesn't pay "on call" though?

Management is never paid for being on call in my experience. It's just expected that you can be called any time for any reason.

I've never been paid extra for 'on call', always been salaried and had it added as an expectation after the fact.

I'll admit I've quit over it.

I am an underpaid (for my area, experience, title, coworkers, etc) software developer who has occasional on call shifts and once a year holiday shifts with no extra pay or benefits

Your argument seems to be that he should be instantly available on his telephone but not on zoom or slack? Seems like you're just shuffling the problem around.

I think that's pretty reasonable. Most people at the end of the day are available whenever via a phone call. But if you use it for something trivial, they will be pissed. Seems like a decent system to me.

In this age of mobile phones, a phone call is the gold standard for realtime business communication. It's pretty reasonable to expect someone to answer their phone if their direct supervisor calls during work hours. Text messages are more fuzzy with the implied expectation of response time. Online messages (IMO anyway) shouldn't be considered a realtime channel.

It was entirely my fault to be over reliant on notifications.

A coworker had his work Macbook synced up to his iPhone messages app, and was getting blown up during a meeting by his friends in a group chat ranting about Trump.

It could have been way worse. I've never understood why people sync their personal messages/emails to their work computers. It can and does get watched - gods help you if your friends have a borderline taste in memes and send you something offensive while you're presenting.

I dunno, I'd generally think of this as probably the better failure mode for this particular feature! It's popular enough that there are dedicated apps to help with it (https://muzzleapp.com – which if I'm honest I'm just sharing because the website is that good).

Now I wish there was a prank app generating those kind of notifications when someone shares a screen. Would be great to install on any friend/coworker who forgets to lock his laptop before stepping out.

I have little to no interest in the app, but that website is in fact that good.

You can keep notifications disabled on desktop but enabled on phone, and keep your phone in front of you while presenting. Ignore single dings and notifications with silent / vibrate. But you should notice multiple slack dings this way and can react. Also can see calendar notifications pretty easily.

With the expectation being that people should be reachable via phone?

I mean, I guess I gave in too, with Slack notifications now showing up on my phone, which feels like a defeat, but this expectation of reachability seems wrong to me, at least if it’s not a dedicated work phone.

My own private phone should ideally not receive any work-related notifications.

> increasingly frustrated messages from him on Slack

I always say to people "if it's urgent then phone me".

Software has too many ways to fail to notify you. I miss text messages because my phone is charging in the other room, I miss Slack notifications because I reinstalled Windows on one machine and relied on the Slack web UI rather than the desktop app. There's so may ways to misconfigure notification services. My phone ringing is hard to ignore.

Also - I forget to act on SMS and WhatApp messages all the time because they conflate "read" with "done". I have a second rule - "if you want me to remember it then email me."

I think Zoom is doing its job there. It can't know about other stuff you have planned, and suppressing alerts when screen sharing is a good idea.

Let's not blame too much on tech

Disabling distracting notifications during a presentation is a good feature. Presumably you were going over actual work with your colleague. Your manager sounds like a nightmare control freak, if you're not over-stating their frustration.

Edit: more charitably, I don't know anything about your manager. But if you did accurately represent their frustration and they're normally a good manager who can take feedback, feel free to share that they came across as a nightmare control freak in this situation.

> missed my 1:1 ... increasingly frustrated messages

>> nightmare control freak

I don't know why you jumped to that, seems like a totally normal reaction to me. I think your judgement is a little harsh or at least making a lot of assumptions.

I disagree that it's a normal reaction to missing a virtual 1:1. An appropriate reaction would perhaps involve at most 2 messages, one a prompt for the meeting, and if not responded to, a followup asking to reschedule when they're available. If I finished a collaboration with a colleague that ran over time, and came back to "increasingly frustrated messages" from my manager, I would take that as a rather large red flag.

"ready to go"

"you there?"

"still waiting... ETA??"

What a nightmare control freak, huge red flag, jeez...

Yes, that is a nightmare. You know how many messages you need to send over chat in situations like this?

ONE. Not at least. AT MOST.

This isn't like yelling across the hallway and being unsure if your friend heard you.

This isn't like coming to your spouse's room to tell them dinner is ready, them not coming in 5 minutes, and you coming back to get them again.

Work chat systems show read receipts. YOu know if the person got the message. And there will be a permanent record for them to see it.

If they're not responding there are two possibilities: A) They saw the notification/you message B) They didn't.

If it's B, more messages won't help notifications appear.

If it's A....don't you maybe have some trust in your coworkers (presuming this isn't a 15 year old on their first job at MacDonalds) that they know how to prioritize and if they're not responding to another human being it's probably because they have some reason not to?

They might be mid conversation. They might be dealing with a production issue. They might have a screaming baby in the room next to them.

And in all these cases, if you give them a minute, they'll arrive, apologize profusely for missed the 1on1 or keeping you waiting, and either proceed or reschedule.

Meanwhile, you've already blocked this time off for the meeting. So go and reply to some emails, or work on a promo doc, or hell if you work too hard already, take a break, and click around on hacker news for a few minutes.

It'll be fine.

I would absolutely without hesitation would not work for, and would quit working for a manager who treated me with three messages like you just described.

Let's agree to disagree and leave it at that.

Windows 10 is a bucket of shit, it doesn't show me any notifications (I think it thinks I'm connected to a projector instead of a second monitor so it helpfully switches to "presentation mode"), but a few hours later it would flood me with the suppressed notifications from the whole day. Yay!

It also likes to fuck with my keyboard layout settings: the PCs at work come with German, French and Italian layouts (guess the country!), and that's the default for the "system", which is the configuration Windows uses at the login/lock screen, but I just use German and added English. Very often, Windows would decide that my keypresses should now be interpreted as French instead of English, despite the language icon saying "ENG"...

The "ENG" just means the user interface is in English, not the keyboard language, if you use a default height taskbar it will show, "ENG" with "US" below for the layout which you can change using multiple hotkeys one is Windows Key + Space another is alt + shift I think

> The "ENG" just means the user interface is in English, not the keyboard language,

Nope, this is incorrect.

The default hotkey for switching input languages is Alt+Shift and there's no UI feedback when you trigger it.

Depending on settings/version of Windows, the input method is actually tracked per-window so it's really easy to end up with weird/annoying behaviour.

If you haven't already I'd suggest disabling that hotkey. You may find the weirdness partially resolves itself.

Nah... the problem is, I would remove the French layout from my user configuration, but Windows would randomly decide to re-add (and use) it. If I go to the languages menu in Control Panel, French would not be listed there. I'd have to add French, and then remove it again. But a few hours later the same bug would hit me again and I'm outputting accented letters all over the place.

I present a LOT -- not with Zoom, EVER, because why trust them, but with other tools -- and I definitely have my OS's "do not disturb" on when I do that.

But I also have 2nd and sometimes 3rd devices rolling so I can keep an eye on email and IMs during those times. Doesn't everyone do that?

I don't have a work phone and don't install work software on my phone.

Ok?

I mean, that puts you at precisely the disadvantage your outlined, but if you don't trust your employer than that's where you are.

I don't have any "work software" on my phone, but I can still see my work email there.

It's not that I don't trust my employer, I just don't have a reason to install stuff. If I miss a notification, then whatever.

> increasingly frustrated messages

Dude, your manager should never get frustrated with you because you didn't come or are late for your 1on1.

Your 1on1 with your manager is YOUR time. It's not THEIR time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24525026

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.

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).

"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.

"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?"

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.

Ah, that makes sense, sort of.

I'm a native English speaker, and that term is definitely wrong for a wake-up alarm. I can't imagine an alarm for when to go to bed, and it definitely doesn't apply to what someone would set on an standard "alarm clock" to wake them up in the morning.

Even when it's a phone call instead of an alarm we say "wake up call". I've never, ever heard the phrase "bedtime alarm" before.

I really hope Apple didn't call it that.

As a native English, but non-Apple user, you're right this is confusing nomenclature, but I intuited what it was supposed to mean.

"Bedtime" is an Apple feature that helps you manage sleep time. Basically you tell when you want to go to bed and wake up and it sets a reminder for bedtime and an alarm for wake up time, then it tracks how much time you sleep. I'm guessing people are saying "Bedtime alarm" to indicate it's the alarm that's set as part of the "Bedtime" feature.

Its the alarm set by the Bedtime feature that lets you choose a sleep duration. You can easily rotate the slider to change it, for example if you need to wake up early. It also prompts you to get ready for bed.

I also updated last night and work up to my Bedtime alarm this morning. Given the amount of people in this thread saying the same, I wonder if the OP actually adjusted something and in fact was not iOS's fault.

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.

Nokia 3310 had the same feature: you could turn it off, but the alarm was still working for weeks.

Wow really? Did all of the models do that? I don't remember that feature.

Almost all the old phones i had did that, also my old Siemens.

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).

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.

Yea my android misses alarms all the damn time.

Well, that's what my boss thinks anyway.

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

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.

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.

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.

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-t...

the icons will move at different times of the day on the whim of the OS. That sounds like hell to me

> 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.

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).

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 :)

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...

> I woke up late and well rested today.

And as usually with iOS, the user experience is excellent!

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!

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.

It's a conflict between capitalism/modern performance society and being human. Of course, the common answer is drugs.

on my 3rd coffee as I read this. too real

Technically, coffee is a drug :)

That's was his point of it being too real...

I prefer insanity as an answer.

Why not both? I heard drugs are great if you are insane

I'm unsure why people are downvoting this. Where's the lie?

It's an uncomfortable truth. Downvoted!

Pretty sure people woke/wake up in uncomfortable hours for communist societies, too. Those factories and farms didn't man themselves.

You're downvoted because anyone born since the 90s has been brainwashed to think that communism was some kind of utopia.

That's it, I'm starting a twitter account for upvoted jokes on HN. That's quite an achievement.

Link!

https://twitter.com/HumorHn

For everyone that wants to follow it: https://twitter.com/HumorHn

https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says the best humor is the kind that lacks self awareness

That is definitely more useful. My version will have a couple of tweets a year at most...

Or the kind that is presented with absolutely 0 context.

Most of those tweets are pretty funny, but I can't help but think that a lot of them wouldn't be so hard to read if we knew the context in which they were said.

i may be able to contribute one or two to that list

Don't take the joke literally.

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.

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.

I see "Maybe Later" as "we'll force it on you sooner or later", because that's what it often means in reality.

then there should be three options:

0) Yes.

1) No means no.

2) Not right now

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

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

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...

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I got a cat about this time last year. I haven't needed an alarm clock since.

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.

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.)

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.

Cool! So far I haven’t jumped on the smartwatch train though. Perhaps in the future :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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://consumeris...

> 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.

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.

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.

Thanks for elaborating. It seems like the impact would be much more less than what I expected.

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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

I simply stopped using the wake-up alarm function due to this. Never figured out how to make it work again.

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

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.]

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

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.

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.

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.

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)

I know, seems like a bad move. God forbid it’s accessible in both places.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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."

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.

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.

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.

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 )))

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

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

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

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

> I woke up late and well rested today.

Sometimes life gives us gifts in the form of grievances.

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

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

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

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

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.

Annoyed because woke up well rested.

Kids these days and their priorities.

“I woke up late and well rested today.”

Looks like a happy accident to me.

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

Did you mean "brazil ocean"? https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=brazilo...

no more like a portemanteau of brazil (the movie) and -cene, like anthropocene

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)

iOS not ringing set alarms. This has happened before.

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

Classic Apple

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.

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.

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

It's not beta software any more. The official public release was yesterday.

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

"It just works"

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".

“And if it doesn’t, just wipe everything, loose all data and configuration, and reinstall”

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.

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

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

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