What would you do if your iPhone played the same alarm every morning at 9:25 AM for years without the Clock app actually showing an alarm for that time? You’d probably try everything to make this iPhone alarm bug from hell disappear. Most likely, you’d go to Apple first, hoping they’d have a solution. You’d change iPhones, hoping that would fix it. Eventually, you’d learn to live with it.
That’s what a woman did before she finally decided to take the matters to the public forum and ask for help.
Angele Sofia is the iPhone user who is experiencing this bug from hell. She’s tried everything TikTokers suggested aside from the one thing that could make it disappear: Resetting the phone to factory settings and setting it up as a new device.
This would be my advice to her. The alarm bug is almost certainly being restored from a previous backup. That explains why it carried over from iPhone to iPhone during upgrades. Transferring old data also transfers the bug.
Setting up an iPhone as a new device can be tricky, and you might lose some data. It might require manually copying files from the iPhone to a PC/Mac and then back again. But it could be the only way that saves you from a bug that’s grandfathered into the software.
Angele Sofia doesn’t want to go through all that, delivering a point I can respect. The alarm wins if you go this route. But then again, the alarm has been winning for years. And everything she threw at it would not work.
The TikTok user posted several videos explaining her problem. The alarm from hell appeared a few years ago, and Apple hasn’t figured it out. Weirdly enough, it only rings once, and it only rings if the iPhone isn’t muted. But the alarm comes on every morning, religiously. If it doesn’t ring, it’ll show a notification. And it doesn’t appear in the Clock app.
Angele Sofia tried the various fixes that other TikTokers suggested. Like clearing the sleep schedule, and removing all alarms and/or focus modes. She has even deleted the Clock app, as you’ll see in one of the clips.
Nothing worked. Or, put differently, the alarm “just works” no matter what you do with the iPhone. At the very least, the annoyed iPhone user can count on always having an alarm in the morning, even if you forget to set one up. Admittedly, 9:25 AM might be a little late for most people, but Angele Sofia works from home.
As for the “It just works” part, it’s a famous line from Apple’s marketing that most Apple device owners probably know. Apple uses it frequently to stress that certain device features should just work for the user. It’s also a meme, which I’ve used for years to describe bugs in iOS and macOS.
Back to Angele Sofia, you can certainly send your suggestions her way if you think you know how to kill this iPhone alarm bug from hell.
I can think of another one, setting up a focus mode that mutes the iPhone from 9:24 to 9:26 each day. The alarm will not ring, though a notification will show up. I’d count it as the alarm losing.
Then again, maybe this is something like the Morse code on the watch from Interstellar. It took Murph (Jessica Chastain) decades to decipher the message from her father. Rather than pointing to Angele Sofia’s death, this iPhone bug might be hailing from the future.
