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Comment by LeonenTheDK | Hacker News Reader

Another common feature of a default app that Apple lacks is having multiple timers on the iPhone clock app. Most often used by my partner when cooking and there are a couple things going that need different times. This is a feature in my Pixel and I just can't understand what reason there is to not include it.

That said though, this is a fantastic work around, I love seeing clever uses of tools to make them do things their creators (probably) didn't necessarily intend.

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The HomePod and Watch both support multiple timers, which makes it more baffling

The teams did not communicate

The clock app team probably had the thought to add it at 3am but couldn't schedule an iMessage to remind their teammates to implement it.

Why don’t my timers sync?

If I start something on my watch or HomePod why can’t I check in on it on my phone?

Why do I need a set of independent timers for ever Apple device I own?

Syncing clocks is surprisingly difficult. On top of that you have to get the message to all the devices that there even is a timer, this might be delivered after the timer expires. I don't think you could do this in a way where people could rely on it. You already have caldav which can sync your agenda, I think that's probably the closest you'll get.

There's a sibling comment that mentions HomeKit timers. I'd bet those are living on some remote machine and you're only able to check them but they behave very differently from local timers.

Where's the trouble in dispatching a message for all devices connected to a given Apple ID, those devices checking whether the timer is in the past (and silently discarding it in that case), and setting a local timer to the desired target time?

As a sibling commenter said, this isn't about millisecond precision, but making sure the timer telling me to take the cake out of the oven I set on the tablet in the kitchen will ring on my phone.

All we need is a start timestamp and access to the current timestamp. If we can improve the accuracy of the 'current' timestamp by hosting it on a remote server, so be it.

But I doubt that's necessary. How much do you think the clocks on computers drift between syncs? I would wager if I isolated my laptop and phone from any networks, they'd continue to show the same time for quite a while.

All the devices are already synced to an NTP server. I don’t need millisecond accuracy here.

You can check a HomePod timer on your phone - it’s in the home app under whatever pod it is, down the bottom

This makes me even more annoyed than if it just wasn't possible

Especially since alarms can sync between phone/watch (or at least you can snooze/cancel phone alarms from the watch, which shows that they're at least talking)

I can turn off a timer set on my phone using my watch but I can't turn off a timer set on my watch using my phone.

> Another common feature of a default app that Apple lacks is having multiple timers on the iPhone clock app.

siri supports this. i mainly use it when cooking and need multiple timers.

It doesn’t allow me to do this. If I ask to create a timer and then ask to create another I’m asked if I want to replace the previous one.

Not on iPhone.

This is why I always loved jailbreaking my iPhones. Typically there is an app out there somewhere that will do what you want but it was always nice to go to cydia and find a tweak that allowed stock apps and functions to do what they normally would not be able to do.

I would love that feature for cooking! It's such a no-brainer.

Edit: it seems there exists an app for that[1]. Gonna try it tomorrow.

[1]: <https://apps.apple.com/us/app/easy-cooking-timer/id492224774>

iOS lacks support for multiple instances of nearly everything. It's the OS of "form over function."

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