i Phone owners are blaming a ‘silent alarm’ problem for costing them jobs — but a fix is finally coming in i OS 27 | Tech Radar

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i Phone owners are blaming a ‘silent alarm’ problem for costing them jobs — but a fix is finally coming in i OS 27

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i Phone users say their i OS alarms are going off silently

How many times have you slept through your phone alarm in the morning? Most of us have experienced it at one time or another — but what if the problem wasn’t so much your heavy sleeping, but more the fact that your i Phone alarm was going off completely silently, meaning it never had a chance of waking you up in the first place?

That seems to be what’s happening to a number of i OS users, with several of them complaining that silent i OS alarms have risked or even cost them their jobs.

In a since-deleted post on Reddit, user Jeremy_keister said that although their i OS alarm had been set and went off in the morning, it did so silently, making it next to useless. The situation, they said, “has practically lost me a job.” Similarly, user okeanouszeke said the same issue had actually “cost me a job.”

Clearly, there’s something going on here, and a little investigation suggests that it might be to do with the volume settings in i OS. Fortunately, it looks like there’s a fix on the way in i OS 27.

If your alarm is ringing silently rather than out loud, it could be due to a certain setting in i OS 26 and earlier. In those versions of Apple’s operating system, there was only one volume control, and this setting would affect alarms, ringtones, system notifications and more all at once.

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That means that if you’d turned the ringtone volume all the way down to zero, your alarms might also be affected. If you happened to look at your i Phone display while the alarm was going off, you’d see it trying to alert you — but with no volume, you wouldn’t hear a thing. And since Apple didn’t build any kind of warning into i OS, you might not even realize that minimizing the system volume would render your alarms useless.

In i OS 27, though, that’s all set to change. Users of the i OS 27 beta have noticed that there’s a new section under Sound & Haptics in the Settings app. There, you’ll find a volume slider for ringtones, one for alarms and timers, and another for alerts and system sounds. In i OS 26 and earlier, you just got one slider that controlled everything.

In i OS 27, then, you can set ringtone volume to zero but push alarm volume to full, ensuring your alarms will still wake you up, even if everything else is silent. That should give you the peace of mind to know that you shouldn’t oversleep, whatever your taste for ringtone volume.

There’s one more issue to be aware of. Some users have reported alarms starting off loud, then suddenly dropping in volume.

One potential solution could be to disable Face ID’s attention features in Settings > Face ID & Passcode > Require Attention for Face ID. Supposedly, Apple’s facial recognition tech notices you looking at your i Phone and assumes that you’re fully awake, disabling your alarm in the process. Turning off this feature should allow the alarm to ring until you manually switch it off.

So, if you’ve been struggling to wake up on time in the mornings and think a silent alarm could be the culprit, there are a few potential solutions to try. When i OS 27 launches this fall, this problem might become a thing of the past.

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Alex Blake has been fooling around with computers since the early 1990s, and since that time he's learned a thing or two about tech. No more than two things, though. That's all his brain can hold. As well as Tech Radar, Alex writes for i More, Digital Trends and Creative Bloq, among others. He was previously commissioning editor at Mac Format magazine. That means he mostly covers the world of Apple and its latest products, but also Windows, computer peripherals, mobile apps, and much more beyond. When not writing, you can find him hiking the English countryside and gaming on his PC.

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• Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards