Context
When I go to sleep, my ‘Sleep’ shortcut sets an iOS system alarm based on when I need to be awake. However, this alarm is mostly a back-up: for my main alarm I use the app Sleep Cycle, which I prefer for several reasons: it has much nicer alarm sounds (that ease you awake more gently than a blaring alarm); it has a wake-up window (so if you start to wake up half an hour before you alarm goes up, it will go off straight away rather than waiting until you have just fallen back asleep); and it also tracks sleep data and sends it to the Health app.
Once I wake up in the morning and turn off the Sleep Cycle alarm, I don’t need the inbuilt alarm to sound.
(There are also some other scenarios where it is useful to make sure there are no alarms toggled on. For example, when I was working with small groups as an auxiliar de conversación in Spain, I set alarms to remind me to change groups. Sometimes I made a mistake (or something changed) and I needed to deactivate the alarms I’d already set before creating new ones. This would also have made that process a little easier!)
Solution
Although Shortcuts doesn’t have a ‘turn off alarm’ action, it now has a ‘toggle alarm’ action.
My ‘Sleep’ shortcut creates a new alarm each evening (because the times are not always predictable). So, for some time I didn’t think this could help me because you need to specify the alarm to be toggled.
However, I was able to resolve this issue with a simple shortcut that loops through all the alarms and ensures they are all toggled to off.
I run this shortcut as part of my ‘Morning’ actions after waking up so it means that the alarm doesn’t sound unnecessarily.
(If I wanted, I could occasionally ask Siri to ‘delete all alarms’ to properly clean things out.)
The Shortcut
The shortcut looks like this:
Instructions for Use
You can save this Shortcut to your own device by clicking here.
(I am currently running the iOS 13 beta so this may or may not work on iOS 12–but it should be easy to recreate based on the above screenshot, and it doesn’t use any actions that are specific to iOS 13.)