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Apple's New Alarm Design in iOS 26 Might Make You Oversleep
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Even with the Taptic alarm on my watch, I'm liable to sleep through it. Traditional beeping alarm clocks always worked for me, but they're boring and not a good experience.
So, I use shortcuts now to blast "Never gonna give you up" at 7:00 AM. What's better than getting rickrolled before you get out of bed?
So, I use shortcuts now to blast "Never gonna give you up" at 7:00 AM. What's better than getting rickrolled before you get out of bed?
STOP should be a tiny button that's always in a different place on the screen. Also, make it a captcha. To turn off the alarm, select all squares with traffic lights.
Yeah sure! Your inability to get enough sleep, requiring you to hit snooze, is the fault of a multi-national company, and it’s 2nd iteration of beta software!
Tip: for a good nights sleep, don’t keep your devices in your bedroom, and invest in a traditional alarm clock. If you want a ‘tech’ solution, get a smart lamp/bulb, programmed to turn on at a certain time, requiring you to get out of bed.
This is my alarm clock. Yes, the Snooze/Light button runs the entire width, whereas the other buttons, including the Stop one, are comparatively minuscule. And ALL other alarm clocks I and my family had over the years followed similar layouts. Apple can’t screw with decades upon decades of muscle memory and UX conventions.
This reminded of an episode from Seinfeld. Kramer sets his mental alarm, then oversleeps due to a blown fuse in his apartment.my super power is that I do not need an alarm ever. You tell me to be somewhere at 5 am? No problem! I will automatically wake up at 3:30 am to make sure I am ready.
One time I did get woken up by an alarm and it was HORRIBLE. I was like "this is how people normally feel in the morning???"
I have failed to see the aesthetic in most Apple-things lately. This Glass-UI looks horrendous in most screen shots so I hope they will refine it or, as seems to be the norm these days, add gazillion of settings to turn them off.
The app sleep cycle has a good solution to this problem to snooze just touch the phone. To stop you have to press a button.
In the iOS 26 beta, Apple has redesigned the alarm screen in the Clock app, giving it a cleaner look with a larger time display and significantly bigger buttons. When the alarm goes off, you'll now see two large, equal-sized buttons for Stop and Snooze placed side by side at the bottom of the screen.
Alarm screen in iOS 18 (left) versus iOS 26 beta 2
While the redesign fits with Apple's broader visual refresh in iOS 26, it also seems to address a problem the company had already solved: reducing the chances of you hitting Stop instead of Snooze when you're half-awake and fumbling for your phone. Ironically, internal testing once showed that making both buttons the same size actually made that mistake more likely.
According to Jack Fields, a former Apple engineer and head writer at Kernel Extension, the new layout contradicts internal research he was involved in during his time at the company. That testing included a version of the Clock app that logged user interactions to a heat map, tracking exactly where people tapped the screen upon waking.
"It was recording where our sleepy hands were smacking around on the screen in order to see how accurate we were in turning off the alarms," says Fields. What they found was perhaps counterintuitive: when Stop and Snooze were made the same size and placed close together, users were 30% more likely to hit Stop by accident. In other words, it actually increased the chances of oversleeping.
That's why recent versions of iOS feature a prominent, centered Snooze button and a much smaller Stop button tucked further down the screen. "By making the Stop button such a small hit target, it ensures you're awake enough to actually stop it," Fields explains.
"This new design is... interesting," he adds. "It goes against any studies I was a part of, so I'm curious what data they have to support the change. It's terrifyingly large now."
It's worth remembering this is beta software, and Apple could tweak the layout before the final release. But for now, the update makes you wonder whether a more symmetrical, simplified UI is always better, or (at least in this case) is it more likely to make you tap the wrong thing, just faster?
In a related change you may have missed, Apple also now allows users to customize snooze length, choosing a length of time between 1 minute and 15 minutes. (Previously, tapping snooze always snoozed an alarm for nine minutes.) Now that's a change we can certainly get behind.
Article Link: Apple's New Alarm Design in iOS 26 Might Make You Oversleep
It should always have just been a 'slide to stop'. The thing you never want to do accidentally is the thing that should be designed to have the most deliberate action. It wouldn't even be inconsistent with Apples other design features - like Slide to power off, or Slide to Call emergency services.
Why even have a stop button to accidentally tap? Just make it where you either enable or disable snooze in settings. If enabled, make it the ONLY button. And if you want it to stop, wake up and turn the alarm off in the clock app. Simple, and I really wish this was the case with the watch, which is even more prone to half-asleep stop button taps.
Theres an inconsistency between alarm and timer of clock app. Firstly, the yellow button means snooze, and for the second, the yellow button is to stop alarm (on screen when display is off and gets enabled by timer end). This confuses if you use both regularly.
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Is it just me, or are the colors confusing as well? I feel like the one that stands out most (orange in this case) should be the one that turns off the alarm. This trips me up all the time on my Apple Watch. I think it'd make more sense if Stop was red, and Snooze was gray.
Verifying even the most obvious assumptions in experiments is how you get great truly good user interfaces. You'd be surprised how many things are revealed.
It's what made Apple the leader in human interfaces, but I don't know if they still have the humility and patience to do it these days.
This. Apple can design The Statue of David but can’t leave a good thing alone, and just has to tinker.
Well I don't need some random guy online to tel me what to do, that's may story if you don't like it go do something useful instead LOL