It’s good to be the king!
I recently just found this out despite having used Android phones for almost 5 years now. I was also late that morning and thought my phone had decided to rearrange its settings on its own as it seems to do every now and then.
It took me a while to figure out why my alarm would always be quiet in the morning. I have two alarms on my phone. The problematic one (in this case) had it’s volume controlled by the media volume (or games, if there was one). So everyday, when I’d be playing games with the sound down, I’d be muting the ringer. Then the next day, the games would be really loud. It took a while to put that together.
The other odd problem I had was that pre-installed alarm would sometimes not go off in the morning. In fact, I’d find that it wasn’t even set to go off. One day, I was plugging the phone in and noticed that the alarm turned off. Some odd bug was turning off the alarm, when I plugged the phone in. I had to plug the phone in, then turn on the alarm.
To this day, I keep two alarms (the pre-installed one and one from the play store) so if one malfunctions, the other one goes off a few minutes later, hopefully. I also can’t break the habit of plugging in the phone, then going to each alarm and turning it off and back on, just to be sure.
Part of why I still have an alarm clock by my bed. It has two functions. It tells time, and it makes noise (and lights up) at a pre-determined time.
With my phone, I don’t trust that I won’t accidentally change the volume or mute my alarm at some point while I’m using this crazy electronic multi-tool. And, even more important, I don’t trust that some update isn’t going to change the functionality without me being aware, and make the alarm suddenly not work as expected.