If you live with other people, you’re bound to deal with an unwelcome iPhone alarm. Maybe they’re sleeping soundly through the screeches or left their device behind and forgot to turn off the alarm. Either way, the alarm’s going off in another room, and it’s up to you to get up and turn it off. Or, is it?
To the surprise of many, it turns out you can turn off other people’s alarms with your own iPhone, so long as those people are a part of your Family Sharing account. Family Sharing allows you and up to five other people to share services like Apple Music and Apple TV+, as well as locate family members’ missing devices. If you live with random roommates, you likely aren’t a part of the same Family Sharing space and won’t be able to take advantage of this trick. But many of us live with family members or close friends that use the program, so there are plenty of us out there who can try this out.
There are two other caveats here: both of your iPhones need to be connected to the same wifi network, and the other iPhone needs to have a name that Siri will understand. With all three conditions met, you should have the power to disable your family members’ iPhone alarms from any room in the house.
How to turn off someone else’s iPhone alarm
The next time someone in your Family Sharing plan has an iPhone alarm go off endlessly, activate Siri on your iPhone and say “turn off the alarm on (person’s name’s) iPhone.” Siri will then present you a prompt, asking if you want to turn off the alarm. Choose “Yes,” and you should hear the alarm cut out.
If you’re thinking “how the hell didn’t I know about this,” you’re not alone — I’m not sure anyone outside of Apple knew about this feature before this week. Even the Redditor who shared the feature for the first time figured it out by accident: They heard their wife’s alarm going off, and, as a joke, asked their iPhone’s Siri to turn it off. Obviously it worked, because here we are, but it’s a bit hilarious we’re still finding iPhone features by accident. Does Apple even know this feature exists?
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