This problem is called a silent alarm problem. This can be quite problematic as there are reports where people failed to catch a flight, or missed an important appointment.
1. Force Restart the iPhone
Before we move to other solutions, you should force restart your iPhone to rule out the bad cache. If the issue was cleared but reoccurs after some time, make a habit of force restarting the iPhone daily just before going to sleep.
2. Disable the Attention Aware Feature
The attention Aware feature can silence your alarms if it detects your face. However, we have seen this feature malfunction when users are not looking at the screen. To further find the root cause of this issue, we suggest temporarily disabling this feature and testing the alarms.
3. Delete and Recreate Alarms on the iPhone
Your existing alarms could be bugged and not trigger your iPhone’s ringer. In this case, you have to delete all the existing alarms and create new ones. This will overwrite the problematic alarms and can fix your issue. Set an alarm to test 2 minutes from your time. If it works well, you can change their configurations including Snooze and custom alarm tone.
4. Change the Alarm Tone
If your alarm on your iPhone isn’t going off, it could be because the ringtone file is damaged or not working properly. This issue is very common if you aren’t using the tones from the default library. Switch to a ringtone that comes pre-installed on your iPhone to fix this issue.
5. Edit the iPhone’s Sound Settings
The alarm on your iPhone will also not ring if the iPhone’s sound settings are not configured properly or are silent without you knowing it. In this scenario, editing the iPhone’s sound settings to the maximum will solve the problem. If this doesn’t work, make sure the silent switch is toggled off. There is a silent mode switch on the side of your iPhone. Sometimes if that switch is toggled to enabled, then that will not let any alarm ring. Even though this isn’t by design, we’ve still seen it happen in multiple cases. Here, disabling the iPhone’s silent switch will do the trick.
6. Download the Music Track to the iPhone in High Quality
Lossless audio format is not supported to be used as alarm ringers in iPhone. If you’re using a music track as an alarm tune, then it will not ring at all. Here, we can change Music settings to make sure this format is not set by default by the operating system.
7. Enable Snooze on Multiple Alarms
If you are a heavy sleeper and enable multiple alarms but the first alarm has a snooze & the others do not, then that could create conflicts. The first alarm’s snooze mechanism will override the other alarms that are scheduled later. This is a reported bug in iOS. In this case, enabling Snooze on multiple alarms will solve the problem.
8. Disable “Change with Buttons” in Settings
If you have a habit of controlling the alarm’s volume through the buttons, then you may accidentally turn it down, which may make it seem like the alarm didn’t go off. In this case, disabling the “Change with Buttons” option in the iPhone’s Ringer and Alerts settings can remedy the problem.
9. Disable the Focus & Sleep Mode
In some cases, Do Not Disturb focus modes prevents alarms to go off at all. Even if they do, they will be in a lowered volume. In this scenario, we can disable the focus modes altogether. If you have a proper sleep schedule in place, you can disable it for good to be sure it doesn’t get enabled again.
10. Disable Bluetooth on the iPhone
You will not hear an iPhone alarm going off if due to a glitch, the iPhone “thinks” there is a Bluetooth device like Airpods or Bluetooth speakers connected to the iPhone. The alarm will get directed to that device instead. Here, disabling the iPhone’s Bluetooth can do the trick.
11. Disable Notifications on the iPhone
An alarm will not ring on your iPhone if another notification is received at the same time as your alarm. Chances are very low but we’ve seen this happen. In this case, disabling iPhone notifications before going to sleep will resolve the issue.
12. Resetting All Settings
If none of the above methods works, you can attempt resetting all your settings before we move on to factory resetting your entire iPhone. Do not forget to note down/back up the info like Wi-Fi credentials that you will require later.
14. Reset the iPhone to the Factory Defaults
If you’re reading this far down and nothing worked at this point, we can move ahead and factory reset your entire phone. This is more of a guaranteed fix. Before moving on, charge the phone’s battery to full, and do not forget to create a backup of the iPhone.
