I remember when software was supposed to remove pain points in my life, but now I'm not so sure. I often contemplate whether switching from Spotify to the CD player in my car will save me time, but I'm fairly certain it will save me aggravation.
Back in the day I had an alarm clock. I set it to go off at a specific time and it did. The only failure mode was the battery running out.
Then I got a Nokia phone. It worked the same as the alarm clock, but I could even set myself notifications and what not. Worked great!
Then I got an Android phone and sometimes the alarms just wouldn't work.
And now today I'm using another Android phone and I give it about 80-20 odds that the alarm works correctly. Sometimes it doesn't work at all. Sometimes it does a quick alarm for a few seconds and stops. And I don't know why.
Notifications on this are even worse. Sometimes the notifications are so unnoticeable that sitting next to the phone with headphones on will not actually alert me to the notification.
I don't see others ever complain about it so I feel like I'm somehow missing something big but I don't know what. Notifications and alarms on modern phones seem extremely unreliable to me.
Unfortunately my sister keeps stealing it (back) every time she visits!
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006912104394.html
It's _so_ much better than my phone as a general duty kitchen timer. The best thing is I can just leave it going off and it'll just run down the spring and stop. _So_ much better an experience than needing to get my phone out of my pocket when my hands are covered in whatever I'm cooking.
(Not saying that makes your comment wrong, just pointing out the precise way you need to "Think Different" to make your iPhone work for you.)
If I used timers I would have to carefully subtract the desired wake up time from the current time. It's not the same at all.
I can't fathom how it could possibly be failing that often for you.
I've usually used my $3-4 alarm clock for waking me up in the morning, and then my phone timer for naps.
Now that I just took a closer look, I was able to find a way to disable automatic updates on the phone. (I had to find and tap "Software update > System Update Preferences > Smart Update" in the Settings app.) But I like the alarm clock, so I'll probably keep using it anyway. Better that my phone isn't the first thing I interact with every day.
I disabled Smart Update after reading your post but considering my phone used to prompt me to update, then started doing them on its own - I wouldn't trust that setting to stick.
I don't know what's going on there; I've read hints that for some people, their phone thinks it's in a call, and manifest such behavior in that situation. Some reports blame Facebook Messenger. What I know for sure is that it isn't restart or update related.
And yes, it's beyond ridiculous for this to be happening in the first place. It might just become a poster child of how idiotic tech has become. For the past decade or so, it feels that each generation of hardware and software, across the board, is just fucking things up more - even things you thought were so simple and well-understood you couldn't possibly fuck them up, like alarms or calculator apps.
That's kind of the problem I think.
I think it's something to do with how I listen to podcasts but haven't been able to work it out.
Since then, all of the failure modes I knew about were fixed. Now I think the only thing that makes an alarm fail on Android is if you run out of battery charge. Of course, that doesn't make me any less paranoid about it.
But anyway, the notifications seem to only get less reliable with time.
After the episode he was dead and I missed the whole thing b/c somewhere along the way "press volume button at home screen until it was full" did not actually turn notifications on anymore. I've never been so mad at UI/UX.
Turning on ringer / notification volume requires pressing volume button once, then clicking the equalizer, then dragging the notification volume up to desired level. There's no indication anywhere that notifications are silenced. I have a google pixel 4.
And the alarm still went off making noise. I managed to turn it off superquick such that the comedian got as far as looking in my general direction and saying I was lucky I was fast because he couldn't pick me out exactly.