They can’t code menus properly any more either - in macOS, try selecting something like a time from the drop-down menus for a reminder (on the main list of the reminders app, not in the window for editing that particular reminder). Immediately after releasing the mouse button while the cursor is over the time you want, move it slightly up or down while the flash animation occurs - you have now selected a different time with no warning. Completely inconsistent with the way every other menu has worked on macOS since 1984. Logged a bug years ago, but presumably they have better things to do.

That bug burned me a couple times before I switched to using 24-hour time exclusively on my devices.

For something that people use everyday, the iOS vertically-scrolling, fake-dial UI is just horrible in terms of usability and aesthetics, and I was glad when they added the ability to summon a numeric keypad with a single tap on the center dial.

The keypad input and interaction is extremely well thought out and efficient for setting the time.

Wow so it wasn’t me. All this time and Apple can’t code an alarm properly.

Switching from Android to iPhone caused lots of problems and this was one of the big ones.

But what pisses me off the most is when I've talked to other engineers/programmers about this (or similar issues) they just dismiss me with things like "you're not holding it right", "okay, but what's the value?", or "is it really a big deal?" (Yes, it is a big deal that I set something and then it undid itself! Yes it's a big deal, that's why I'm fucking late and we're having this conversation!)

Like come on guys, we're being paid north of $100k/yr (most well above that) and you can't just take the time to fix things? Earn your wage. Take some pride. Push back against your manager or just fucking fix it if it's quick.

I swear, there's so much added complexity in these systems created by people proclaiming we need to keep it simple. What's simple about the alarm clock and timer clock having different interfaces yet are visually identical? What's simple about duplicated calendar events that could be hidden with a regex? What's simple about a system that can't find contacts with identical names, hiding the process for users to manually merging them, and adding a new birthday event when they finally succeed?! (This literally happened to me. My partner had 2 contacts in my phone, 3 birthdays, and when I merged I ended up with 4 and 3 I couldn't delete because they weren't associated with a contact...)

We're making software worse. The AI isn't replacing jobs because we're getting more productive, it's replacing jobs because we pushed the bar so fucking low I'm more impressed to see that the code isn't written in Perl or Brainfuck

I wonder if that’s also related to a bug or buggy UX, where in iOS safari you have to wait for the website scroll momentum to stop before the bookmark button context menu from long-press will fire/appear.

I guess it might all be computationally more efficient and better on battery life?

That's why the sleep/wake up alarm exists. It's a really nice UI. You set your weekly schedule, and if you need to push your alarm back, it uses a circular clock UI showing you how much sleep you'll get.

Wow, this explains an alarm I missed literally yesterday which ended up being set to today AM instead of yesterday PM like I thought I set it.

One more reason to switch to 24h time? 0:)

Setting alarms is one of the few tasks I can rely on Siri to handle correctly, so I haven’t used the app in years.

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I can never remember if AM is After Midnight or After Midday or PM is Post Meridian or Post Midnight, or it's something like that, not to mention when 12:00 is... is it 12:00 or 0:00?. But ah well, I'm lucky to be in a place where we use 24h clocks (but hey, max we see is 23:59:59!) (unless they have arms). Btw, the iOS calendar is (was probably) also pretty "broken" [0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER1a6jgW1Gs

Google’s Clock app seems to do most of the things: sliders on main screen, circular time picker (though I’m not exactly a fan), and a toast notification with the time until the alarm fires. The only thing missing are the every day/never options.

The Android clock app is pretty solid and looks something like that.

As a switcher to iPhone earlier this year, so many UI quirks drive me utterly bonkers. Can't stand these slow rotating dials, and for alarms specifically, I miss the confirmation that Android shows you "going off in 12 hours" or whatever, to make sure you didn't get the AM/PM or day of the week wrong.

But mostly, these numeric spinners are just terrible. In the Hilton app I have to put my kids ages all the time and it drives me crazy spinning the stupid little things to set their ages. Sigh.

I don't know how iOS got this reputation as magical and delightful and intuitive. I'm ready to go back to my Pixel, I think.

Funnily enough, the Sleep Schedule settings screen on iOS (accessed through the Health app) looks very similar to this.

A good smartphone, really. Crying shame that Nokia gave up just when they had the best product in a long time.

Many people nowaday can't read clocks with hands, so if you want to sell to the mass, you need to take that into consideration.

If we perfect the design we'll be out of the job!

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Just give me a keyboard (on-screen or otherwise)! Four taps max and I'm done.

> like a "keep my recurring alarm on, but skip it tomorrow" button (useful for when you don't want to wake up early on labor day)

If you use the Sleep feature, instead of a plain alarm for an “alarm clock,” it has had this feature for quite a few years now. Any modification made to Sleep, which is manageable from within the same Alarm app, prompts to ask if you’d like to change your entire sleep schedule or just apply the modification (shut off, or reschedule) to the next one up.

woah, Apple lets you make your own alarm app? looks like a wide open door for vulnerabilities...

> keep my recurring alarm on, but skip it tomorrow

You can skip the next alarm or change it when using a sleep schedule (special alarm for waking up, also support schedules for different waking hours depending on the day of the week; setup directly in the same location as any other alarms).

I don’t find it bad, just simple, which makes sense for a default offering.

I think you could fake it by automatically snapping the user back to the middle when they reach the top or bottom. Still not “infinite scroll”

It's written like this because making a circular, infinite list that repeats and recycles the same few components is awful to write, and "(0..60).times(50).flatten()" solves 99% of the problems with 1% of the effort.

Product would probably raise this as a blocker after QA managed to scroll to the end. Who cares.

This is unrelated to timezones or Clock.app

The limitation comes from the UIPickerView system level UI component. I have a similar "bug" in my app.

I bet it just happened organically. Started as an A…Z list but then someone had to implement it so that it cycled.

And the simplest solution at the UI level is to make it a finite list that cycles multiple times. And that simple impl required no updates over the years despite changes to the UI toolkit.

e.g. compare the HTML solution to one that is a virtualized JS infinite list. The HTML finite list solution is trivial while the infinite cycling one probably needs to be ported when you change frameworks (like move to SwiftUI).

pragmatism > perfectionism!

I have the same one, and my favorite unexpected feature coming from other more digital alarm clocks is that you have to set it every night. There is nothing but an on/off switch; if the alarm is ringing, you switch the alarm off, then turn it back on in at least 12 hours (or else it'll go off at, say, 8PM). That means part of my nightly routine is checking my calendar and turning on my alarm as appropriate, but now I never worry about the alarm being set for too early/late/on on a holiday. Also, it's so loud, I haven't fallen back asleep after the alarm since I got it.

So if you're fumbling at your phone half asleep the large and bright orange button in the place you're most used to is the snooze button, which is easy to hit without actually waking up.

Hitting the out of place small gray button to turn the alarm off entirely is easy to do if you're slightly more awake.

If you turn snooze off in the alarm settings you can have a big orange Stop button in the middle like with timers.

But I understand this design was too helpful and is being removed in iOS 26 because the different looking buttons don't match and the most important thing for an alarm is that it look pretty.

Thank you brother. This has been driving me insane for years. A remarkable lack of attention to details.

They're almost certainly not storing a static list of numbers. As others have noted, they're using a UIPickerView. The delegate for that class has two methods that are particularly relevant for this, one that gets the value at "current row number" and one that says how many rows are in the model. The logic for the "current row" is almost certainly the normal modulo logic we're all familiar with. But since the component needs a "size" value for the data set, they pick something arbitrarily large on the (reasonable) assumption that no one will actually ever scroll that far unintentionally.

Yep something that years ago would have been worth the memory savings but now memory is cheap and even the CPU cycles are a non-issue: it's about what was faster for the developer to implement.

Technically you'd need precise measurements of specific implementations to determine that?

It’s terrible discoverability, but a single click seems to do the trick, no long press necessary.

Agree the discoverability is awful. Any chance you've discovered how to make keyboard entry the default?

Huh, thank you for this!

It would still have a beginning. And it would not be “for free” as the used/seen part of the data structure would remain in memory.

> It's no wonder iOS apps are so bloated and shitty.

Compared to what?