Remove Your iPhone’s Annoying Alarm Slider in a Few Easy Steps

No one likes being woken up by an alarm, and if you can’t quickly turn it off, you run the risk of waking up others near you, too. When Apple released iOS 26.1 in November, the company made it a little more difficult to turn off your iPhone’s alarm with a new slider. This slider replaces the Stop button when your alarm goes off.

The change seemed designed to prevent you from accidentally turning off your alarm too quickly with a single tap while reaching for your phone. But the slider can cause you to stumble out of bed trying to figure out why your alarm won’t turn off despite pressing the Stop button like you have a thousand times in the past, all while your baby is now awake and crying, which wakes up your wife, who is now asking what is happening.

Hypothetically, that is.

Apple also introduced a new setting that allows you to disable this slider. So if you loathe the Alarm slider like me, you can remove it and bring the Stop button back to your device in a few easy steps. Here’s how.

Bring your iPhone’s alarm button back

1. Tap Settings.
2. Tap Accessibility.
3. Tap Touch.
4. Enable the toggle for Prefer Single-Touch Actions near the bottom of the menu.

Once enabled, you can tap the button on your screen to stop the alarm, rather than using the slider. Enabling this toggle doesn’t appear to affect any other iPhone functions, but that could change in the future.

If you want to bring the alarm slider back after disabling it, follow the steps above and disable the Prefer Single-Touch Actions toggle.

For more iOS news, here’s everything you should know about iOS 27 and our iOS 26 cheat sheet.

Zachary McAuliffe

Senior writer

Zach began writing for CNET in November, 2021 after writing for a broadcast news station in his hometown, Cincinnati, for five years. You can usually find him hanging out with his wife, son and dog in their home.

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