How Long Is The iPhone Alarm Snooze Time (And Can You Change It)? – SlashGear

If you try setting an alarm on your iPhone right now, rig it to go off in the next minute, and hit Snooze when it does, you’ll notice that it’ll automatically switch your alarm into snooze mode, with an additional nine minutes on the clock. Every time you hit the snooze button or any other external iPhone button except the onscreen Stop button, it will keep tacking on an extra nine minutes, regardless of how much additional time you actually want or need. The same is true for other smartphones as well. Depending on what model you have, the ability to define the alarm’s snooze duration may not always be outright available through the built-in clock app settings. If you’re an iPhone user, you are out of luck: There is currently no way to customize your alarm’s snooze duration.

Where did the nine-minute time limit come from? Although Apple doesn’t specify why the default snooze time is set at this odd interval — or why the company has never updated iOS to include a way to modify it — the consensus online is that it’s probably patterned to the very first alarm clock that offered a snooze function made by General Electric-Telechron in the 1950s, aptly named the Snooz-Alarm. Although earlier examples of the revolutionary device offered a lengthier fifteen-minute snooze time, it eventually settled on the nine-minute time limit in order to accommodate the standard gear setup that alarm clock makers already had in circulation at the time for older clock models. Apparently, programming a single-digit snooze was a less complicated endeavor, and nine was the highest single numeral. Nine minutes is still regarded by many — Apple included — as the standard duration for any device that offers an alarm-with-snooze feature.