If you’ve slept through an important meeting or missed your alarm lately, it may not be entirely your fault if you’re an iPhone user. For weeks now, iPhone users have been reporting on social media that their devices are no longer ringing.
Today, The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern finally confirmed this. According to Stern, Apple has confirmed that it’s aware of the issue causing some alarms not to play a sound and is working on a fix.
The iPhone alarm problem seems to be tied to Apple’s Attention Aware features. For those unfamiliar, it’s a feature that lowers the volume sound of your alerts and alarms if you’re looking at your device and avoids dimming the screen, similar to how Samsung phones keep the screen on if they see you looking at your screen.
According to 9to5Mac, social media users are speculating that Attention Aware is incorrectly detecting attention and lowering the volume of alarms, even when the iPhone isn’t actively being used. Apple hasn’t confirmed that this is true, but it sounds fairly reasonable on the face of it.
The easiest and quickest way to fix this issue until Apple rolls out a fix is to disable Attention Aware. To do this, go into Settings > Face ID & Passcode, then turn off the Attention Aware Features toggle.
If the bug is tied to an implementation of Attention Aware, this should help you avoid the issue. We recommend testing your alarms after doing this to make sure they’re working. If all else fails, you might need to stick to the tried and true old-school alarm clock.
It’s unclear when exactly Apple will issue a fix for the alarm issue, but fingers crossed it’s sooner rather than later. If the company is already aware of what’s going on, it shouldn’t be too much longer. Otherwise, you may have to have an awkward conversation with your boss about why you were late to work.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.
Samsung’s scandal over its Game Optimizing Service, or GOS, has returned with a bill attached. South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has tentatively fined the company 20.1 billion won, or about $15.1 million, over gaming claims made for the Galaxy S21, Galaxy S22, and Tab S8.
The regulator says Samsung promoted the devices as gaming powerhouses without disclosing that GOS placed preset CPU and GPU limits on certain demanding games. Samsung disputes that conclusion, calling GOS a legitimate way to manage heat.
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