Listening to ARC via Airpods (Pro3) then (1) pausing from the lock screen and (2) putting the airpods in their case creates a bug whereby any subsequent iOS alarm sound is muted. The alarm goes off but no sound plays through the phone speaker. This is on iOS 26.1 (it also occurred on 26.0 and iOS 17.x so is not new)
Thank you for reaching out and for the clear description of the issue — that’s very helpful.
At first glance, what you’re describing appears to be an iOS audio routing bug, not ARC-specific behavior. ARC shouldn’t control or mute iOS alarm output.
To confirm, we’ve checked our existing internal reports and public iOS-related issues, and we are not currently tracking a known ARC bug that matches this behavior.
However, the pattern you describe — pausing playback from the lock screen, then closing AirPods → iOS failing to release the audio session → alarms muted — is consistent with Apple audio session regressions reported by some users in iOS 17 and iOS 18 betas.
To help us narrow this down, could you test the following?
Reproduce the issue once more
Start ARC playback via AirPods
Pause from lock screen
Close AirPods
Trigger an alarm manually (using “Test Alarm” if available)
After the alarm is muted, please capture the following:
Does audio resume normally for other apps?
Does the alarm sound return if you open/close Control Center?
Does it return after toggling Bluetooth off/on?
Does the alarm work if ARC was not the last active audio app?
Please also send us:
Your iPhone model
iOS version
ARC version (Settings → About)
This will help us determine whether ARC is leaving an audio session active (unexpected) or whether iOS is mishandling the route transition.
If we can reproduce this internally, we’ll escalate it to our development team and open a bug ticket.
Thanks again for reporting this — and we’ll watch for your follow-up details.
