watchOS 11.4 lets your Apple Watch play alarm sounds in Silent Mode
The watchOS 11.4 update enables your Apple Watch to play alarms with sound even when the Silent Mode has been turned on, like when you’re asleep.
This is how sound-based alarms work in the built-in Clock app on your iPhone, iPad and Mac. Before watchOS 11.4, however, alarms with sound were automatically silenced whenever Silent Mode was turned on, with only the haptics played.
So, for example, if you manually configure an alarm with sound with an earlier time than your schedule in the Sleep feature, you would only feel vibrations on your wrist, but no sound would be played. watchOS 11.4 fixes this with a new toggle when setting up or editing alarms, labeled “Break Through Silent Mode.”
How to play Apple Watch alarms with sound in Silent Mode
Open the Sleep app on your Apple Watch, go to the Sounds & Haptics section and find the “Break Through Silent Mode” toggle there. You can also open the Alarm app and select any active alarm to toggle this switch. It does precisely what the name says; turning it on ensures the alarm sound will play in Silent Mode. “Sound and haptics will play if you wear Apple Watch to bed,” reads the feature’s description.
Conversely, turning the setting off will ensure you only feel haptics on your wrist in Silent Mode, like before. The toggle is available separately for each alarm. I’m thankful for it; I can’t recall the number of times I’d slept through the alarm going off while my watch was in Silent Mode because I wasn’t aware that alarms don’t make any noise in Silent Mode. I mean, that’s not how alarms work on my iPhone.
watchOS 11.4 is scheduled to be released in April alongside iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, macOS Sequoia 15.4 and other updates. It also brings support for Matter-compatible robot vacuum cleaners and includes a fix for a bug that could cause face selection to become unresponsive when switching faces.
Source link: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2025/03/25/watchos-11-4-apple-watch-alarm-silent-mode/
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