Alarm periodically not making any sound on iPhone
Roughly twice a month the standard alarm app simply doesn't make any noise when snoozing.
Before going further, I have tried all the recommended solutions with restarting the device, recreating the alarm, factory reset,... but at that point it's already too late. If I have to do these steps it means the alarm did not function and you can imagine the complications that may come from an alarm being completely silent. You miss important meetings, work overtime to compensate, miss half of your day,....
I like to snooze a lot so often after it goes off for the first time, I'll take the device in bed with me and snooze 3 or 4 more times. Once a month however, it will go into some sort of state where the alarm appears to be going off (I wake up with the alarm screen, ability to stop it or snooze), but there's no sound or vibrations coming from the device at all.
The issue first started on my iPhone 12, some 2 years ago. I then upgraded to an iPhone 13 in January 2023, the issue did not happen at all on iPhone 13 for a few months, and then came an iOS update that destroyed the alarm app again. I can not recall which update exactly, but it's been a solid 3-4 months now that I've been having this issue again. I'm currently on iOS 16.6 (20G75) and had the bug happen to me today.
Potential causes that I can think of:
- Overlapping snoozes
- Sometimes the alarm doesn't wake me, and it just continues to go off rolling into the next snooze period.
- Apple Watch with notifications turned off
- I don't like the watch notifications so they're permanently turned off, but at night the watch is always charging in a different room, not around my wrist. All other iPhone notifications still have sound in this mode.
- Face recognition
- When you look at your phone when the alarm goes off, the sound goes quiet. Perhaps the phone can see my face somehow from where I sleep? I move my phone in my sleep between snoozes so I can't really "put it back a certain way".
You can all imagine the impact a faulty alarm can have in your lives. This software bug has already caused me quite the damage to my professional reputation. How can a device so sophisticated get such a basic simple task wrong? We've had alarms in phones since 1996, and I've never had one of those fail on me. I'm seriously debating on purchasing an old school digital alarm clock but then I think, I've got this 800 euro phone with an alarm clock. There should be no need for me to go back in the past and purchase a device for each basic task all phones can do today.
What can I do or provide to fix this issue once and for all?
iPhone 13