Pandora for iOS Updates with an Alarm Clock Feature

Every once in a while, an app adds a feature that you didn’t know you wanted. Once you see it and use it, though, you wonder how you ever did without it. I’m pretty sure this is the relationship I’ll have with Pandora Radio’s new alarm clock feature, which showed up today in an update to Pandora’s iOS app. It looks like we’ll all be able to put the days of BEEP BEEP BEEP behind me, though the alarm function inside Pandora might not be quite as reliable as an old-school clock.

First, let me walk you through the setup. Pandora made the alarm feature pretty easy to get to — all you have to do is launch the app and tap the icon in the top-right corner to slide the app’s menu in from the right side of the screen. From there, you can tap the On/Off switch next to “Alarm Clock” and set your alarm, as well as the station you’d like to wake up, the default snooze time and the alarm’s volume.

This is where things get a little bit tricky. Once the alarm is set, you can go on about your business. But when you’re ready to go to sleep, you’ll need to go back to the alarm screen and keep it open, and then connect your phone to power so that the alarm doesn’t drain your battery down. It seems that keeping the alarm screen open is necessary due to limitations with iOS, where an app can’t just exist perpetually in the background as it can on Android. It’s possible the alarm could function, but if you open other apps, or if iOS decides it needs to close Pandora out to free up some resources, your alarm may not go off. If you’re someone who needs to wake up at a certain time for work, that just isn’t an option.

Interestingly enough, the operating system that would actually host a fully-functional alarm clock isn’t getting the feature just yet. Pandora claims that alarm clock is being worked on and will come to Android eventually, but users of Google’s mobile OS will just have to make do using other musical alarm apps.

You can hop on over to the App Store to download the latest Pandora update for iOS right now. If you give the alarm function a try, definitely drop us a line and let us know what you think.