Woman offers warning to others after discovering iOS feature was causing her to sleep through alarms

A woman shared a warning after finding out why her iPhone alarms suddenly stopped waking her up in the morning. 

Modern smartphones have more or less entirely replaced alarm clocks. 

But for those who are using their Apple iPhone to get them out of bed on time, one woman has shared an important warning. 

In a clip on TikTok, she explained that out of the blue, she began sleeping late, and it was all down to one iPhone feature.

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The woman said her iPhone alarms suddenly stopped sounding

These days, our phones are a whole lot more than just a way to make calls. 

You can use even the more basic models for everything from taking notes to streaming your favorite TV shows. 

But if you’re an iPhone user who relies on your device to get them up in the morning, then TikTok user Betsy, who posts under the name basicallybetsy_, has a warning for you.

In a clip she uploaded in January last year, she explained that when she began sleeping through her alarms, she initially put it down to being ‘stressed’ or a change in medication, despite typically being a ‘light sleeper’. 

However, after doing some digging, she found that iOS had introduced a new feature called Attention Aware. 

When activated, Attention Aware will stop your iPhone’s screen from dimming while you’re looking at your phone and will also ‘lower the volume of your alerts’. 

It was introduced with iOS 17 and is available on the iPhone X or later, or iPad Pro 11-inch, iPad Pro 12.9-inch, or iPad Pro 13-inch.

Apple says the feature uses the iPhone’s TrueDepth camera, the same one it uses for FaceID, to determine if you’re looking at your screen or not. 

But in her clip, Betsy claimed her iPhone ‘decided to use its own discretion to decide not to put the alarm through’.

She went on to share how to turn the feature off, if you’d rather not use it – simply go into Settings, tap FaceID & Passcode, and toggle off Attention Aware Features. 

Other people have also experienced the same thing

Betsy’s video picked up more than 6,000 comments, and plenty of them from folks who said the same thing had happened to them. 

“I woke up four hours late for work the other day because of this,” one said. 

“I was literally screenshotting that I put on my alarm because I slept through it,” a second person wrote. 

“So this is why my text notifications wouldn’t show up?” someone else asked. 

One disgruntled iPhone owner even headed over to the Apple forum. 

“It causes alarms to silence, and silence from then on, if you groggily pick up and look at your phone while it is going off,” they said. 

“This is an atrocious bug/feature.”

Well, at least there’s an easy way to switch it off. 

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