Clock apps might not be the most exciting apps available for smartphones, but they can be kind of important if you rely on them to set alarms to help you wake up in the morning or remember to do other things like take medication, leave for work, or make an important phone call.

But over the past week, a number of folks have found that alarms set using the Google Clock app aren’t ringing. There’s no word on how many folks have been late for work because of this, but there’s at least one thing you might want to try if you’ve been missing alarms: switch the alarm ringtone from a Spotify song or playlist to something else.

The issue seems to have started about a week ago, with many annoyed users posting 1-star reviews to the Google Clock listing in the Play Store. Some folks at reddit noticed that the issue may not affect all alarms though… just ones where users have used Spotify for an alarm sound. The issue has also been reported by users in the Spotify Community.

A Google representative says a fix is coming soon, but in the meantime, your best bet for making sure you can hear your alarm sounds is to stop using Spotify for alarms, at least temporarily. Or maybe use a third-party clock app.

Honestly, I must have missed the fact that you even could use Spotify for alarms – the company announced integration with the Google Clock app a few years ago, but it’s easy to miss if you haven’t bothered changing your alarm sound from the default, which is where you’d find options for using sounds from other supported apps installed on your device (my phone gives me the option to grab sounds from YouTube Music, Pandora, or Spotify).

The Google Clock app is the default clock application for Google Pixel smartphones, but it’s also been downloaded more than a billion times. Given the fairly small market share held by Pixel devices, that suggests an awful lot of people are using the Google Clock app on non-Pixel devices.

For what it’s worth, I was unable to replicate the bug on my Pixel 4a 5G, even after setting a Google Clock alarm to play a song from Spotify and toggling Do Not Disturb mode.

via Android Authority, xda-developers, PiunikaWeb, and 9to5Google

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8 replies on “If your Google Clock alarms aren’t sounding, trying disabling Spotify ringtones”

  1. repay to @Brad Linder:
    It worked then i browser cache for last 4 weeks.

    thanks happy see your image/photo again 😀

    1. I cannot replicate this, but I heard from another reader having the same issue a few days ago. Are you, by any chance, using Safari?

    1. Might be… might not be. They beauty of “might” is that it’s ambiguous that way 🙂

      I added a “not” anyway just in case.

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