A glitch on Apple's iPhone has stopped its built-in alarm clock going off, leaving many people oversleeping on the first two days of the New Year.

Angry bloggers and tweeters complained that they had been late for work, and were risking missing planes and trains.

Apple has acknowledged the problem and says it will be fixed by 3 January.

The reason has not been given but the glitch appears to affect single alarm settings on the Iphone 4 and earlier models with software updates.

A similar problem hit the iPhone alarm when the clocks went back in November, again causing many users to be late for work or for transport arrangements.

"We're aware of an issue related to non-repeating alarms set for January 1 or 2," Apple spokeswoman Natalie Harrison said in a statement quoted by Macworld.

"Customers can set recurring alarms for those dates and all alarms will work properly beginning January 3."

More than 1.7m people around the world had bought iPhone 4 handsets by June 2010, in what was the company's most successful product launch.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12104890

I'm sure my alarm went off at 0600 on Sunday but when I set it for 1730, not a peep!

Just tested now and it is working fine as they said it would.

It's a pretty poor showing though, how many more errors are we going to see with this clock?

Rather makes you wonder if "clock" was thought such a simple app, they gave the coding job to a work-experience student

To me it seems like they have over complicated it by a very long way.

It almost seems like there is a separate clock driving the alarms as to the one driving the time display (hence the alram offset when the clocks changed).

Exactly how hard can it be to program?

1. Poll for Alarm time, Alarm date/recurrence, Snooze time
2. Check input is valid
3. Store Alarm time, Alarm date, Snooze time
4. If Real Date == Alarm Date OR Recurrence == YES then Goto 5; Else Goto 4
5. If Real Time == Alarm time, sound alarm then Goto 6; Else Goto 5
6. Poll for input to stop Alarm or snooze
7. If input is snooze then add Snooze Time to Alarm time and Goto 5; Elseif input is stop then Goto 8; Else Goto 6
8. If Recurrence == No then Delete Alarm Time, Alarm Date, Snooze Time then Goto 9; Else Wait 60 then Goto 5
9. End

Or have I missed something?

Timezones and daylight savings are a fairly major bugger. And what if a second is missed? Or a minute? Or an hour?

But they shouldn't be part of the Alarm clock routine surely? You'd just deal with them out in the main clock, wouldn't you?

If you want to get up everyday at 0800, you still want to get up at 0800 after the clocks move surely? Thusly the alarm doesn't need to know anything about DST or Timezones.

And this is, perhaps, the problem with both the app and the OS being designed by the same people. Does the Clock app conform to Apple's App Store guides? Or does it make use of private API's? If it does then it might latch onto a variable $base_time, there may be another variable called $daylight_saving_adjustment, the clock on the main screen takes these two variables and adds them together. Et voila! Your alarm clock is wrong.
OK, that can't be what happened as these problems have fixed themselves/don't work like that. But it's easy to see that someone inside Apple, who may not need to work to the same stringent coding standards as outside developers, might do something like that.

Mind you, if the clock app is polling the system clock, and that is off, then it may be something deeper going wrong.

Note that the iOS devices don't sync their time with an external time server, so they do drift after a while.

Hmm perhaps some clever johnny should be writing their own Alarm app...

Duplicates existing functionality... even if it actually "just works"

There are plenty of alarm clock apps on the app store already. Some of them a quite sophisticated and very graphically impressive. Lots of different clock faces and what have you...

Jon

It does seem like a very basic feature to mess up on. Very embarrassing since digital alarms were perfected decades ago.