iPhone’s Alarm Might Be Making Iowans Oversleep

It really may not be your fault that you overslept.

Most of us use our phones for our alarm clocks and it's easy to sleep through an alarm. You hit snooze or 'stop' and poof you've overslept by hours and now you're late. It's even easier if the alarm is quiet or sometimes doesn't even sound at all.

There's been a lot of reports on social media about iPhone alarms not playing sounds. Which is kind of the point of alarms, right? According to 9to5 Mac, folks are saying it's the 'Attention Aware' feature, claiming it's incorrectly detecting attention and lowering the alarm volume...even when the iPhone user is asleep.

@elizabethannswenson Turn off “attention aware features” inside of face id and passcode #iphone15pro #iphonealarm ♬ original sound - Elizabeth

Apple hasn't confirmed if Attention Aware is the root of the problem but the company says they're working to fix the bug. But people are saying that turning the feature off has fixed the problem. To disable Attention Aware, go to Settings, tap Face ID & Passcode, and toggle off Attention Aware.

The issue doesn't seem relegated to iPhone 15's. Macworld blames the most recent iOS update, 17.4.1, which came out on March 21st. A fix to the problem could be in the next iOS update Apple releases, which is expected to be May 7th.

So if you have the most recent iOS update, this seems like a viable excuse as to why you were late to work or anything else you had going on. It's not your fault, blame Apple.