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Watch Alarm = Late for week because of undocumented function "sleepy palm touch"

Firstly, I am not talking about the "Cover to Mute" feature wherein you hold a palm over the watch face for 3 seconds to enable mute. I am talking about a quick palm cover to put the display to sleep.




The vibrating alarm clock feature is one of the main reasons I own an Apple Watch. I love the idea since I can set an alarm that won't as easily wake others.




Nevertheless, the alarm clock app combined with the cover to sleep the screen feature reveals a serious design oversight that yields the Apple Watch as an unreliable alarm clock: you can sabotage the vibrating alarm with a sleepy palm touch.


Repro:


(1) set an alarm on the Apple Watch


(2) when the alarm goes off, observe the "Stop" and "Snooze" icons.


(3) tap neither of these, and instead cover the face of the watch with a palm


(4) the alarm will stop vibrating and pause its state indefinitely


(5) later, tap to wake the screen and observe the same "Stop" and "Snooze" icons, awaiting a decision


(6) be late to work




I'm surprised that I haven't been able to find anything about this online. I really want to use the watch as a reliable alarm, but I cannot trust it because of this.




If you've owned an Apple Watch for any amount of time, you will notice how easy it is to build muscle memory to cover the watch face to sleep the display - especially if you do not use the "Raise to Wake" feature. This action requires almost no dexterity and when you are tired in the morning, can be automatic. There have been too many mornings when I have woken up only to observe that sometime after the alarm went off, I must have palmed the watch in a semi-conscious state, only to not even remember doing so.




When the alarm goes off in the morning, I expect to be forced to actually look at the screen, parse the options, and then _decide_ whether or not to turn it off or snooze, by tapping on one of the 2 options. Covering the face to subvert the entire alarm system is a silly problem that shouldn't exist.




Apple, please fix this.

Posted on Jul 10, 2019 4:15 AM

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Posted on Jul 13, 2019 6:45 PM

Cover to mute is off. The steps to reproduce this issue are 1:) On Watch open Alarms app 2) Create an alarm that will go off in 1 minute from current time 3) When alarm goes touch palm to watch face 4) Observe watch alarm sound turn off/buzz turn off. It takes less than a second, this is not the 3 second cover to mute function. Now you could wait as long as you want. I have waited an hour. The next time you touch to wake the screen the alarm be shown and you can observe the "Stop" and "Snooze" icons, awaiting a decision.

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Jul 13, 2019 6:45 PM in response to Johannkendrick

Cover to mute is off. The steps to reproduce this issue are 1:) On Watch open Alarms app 2) Create an alarm that will go off in 1 minute from current time 3) When alarm goes touch palm to watch face 4) Observe watch alarm sound turn off/buzz turn off. It takes less than a second, this is not the 3 second cover to mute function. Now you could wait as long as you want. I have waited an hour. The next time you touch to wake the screen the alarm be shown and you can observe the "Stop" and "Snooze" icons, awaiting a decision.

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Jul 14, 2019 5:18 AM in response to Branta_uk

I see. Thank you. I was not aware that the "Cover to mute" function is still enabled for the Alarm app even though it is turned off in the Sound and Haptics screen. I just was not able to find this documented anywhere that the Cover to mute will always be enabled for the Alarm app even though you explicitly turn off Cover to mute.

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Jul 14, 2019 5:04 AM in response to vrandazzo

vrandazzo wrote:

If you've owned an Apple Watch for any amount of time, you will notice how easy it is to build muscle memory to cover the watch face to sleep the display - especially if you do not use the "Raise to Wake" feature. This action requires almost no dexterity and when you are tired in the morning, can be automatic. There have been too many mornings when I have woken up only to observe that sometime after the alarm went off, I must have palmed the watch in a semi-conscious state, only to not even remember doing so.

When the alarm goes off in the morning, I expect to be forced to actually look at the screen, parse the options, and then _decide_ whether or not to turn it off or snooze, by tapping on one of the 2 options.


The watch does not have sensors or artificial intelligence to decide whether you are looking at the device and making an intelligent human decision. It appears the watch is Working As Designed and this is a simple case of Operator Error.



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Watch Alarm = Late for week because of undocumented function "sleepy palm touch"

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