UX: Preserve the Settings

Changing a personal computing device has always been a pain. Since the early 1990's when I was among the early adopters of mobile computers (I bought my first notebook in 1990), upgrade has always been painful. And even after almost 25 years it still is.

Two weeks ago I upgraded my faithful Galaxy Note II to Galaxy Note 3. The reason was Poland was the first region where Samsung provided the 4.4 Android Kitkat for Note 3 users. I bough the device, charged the battery and left it for some time to upgrade to 4.4. Then I set up the Google account and it downloaded all the settings from Google's Cloud. The nice thing about the Google cloud is it even brings forward the list of WiFi networks the old device visited, together with memorized passwords.

Then I realized the alarm clock in KitKat was unreliable. I usually set two alarms, 15-20 minutes of each other, each with the "smart alarm" (smooth pre-awakening) option turned on. One alarm was for 5:40, the other was for 6:00 AM. The first one did not sound at all. The second did not started the "smart" way, only yelled at me sharp at 6AM. This repeated for several days in a row. I tried testing the alarms during the day and the all were working fine. But never in the morning.

What a frustrating bug - I was telling the story to the old friend of mine and a long time Apple fan: Google (or Samsung) with the Android 4.4 went the Apple way to break one of the fundamental functions of the phone: the alarm clock. After a week of despair I even installed a 3rd party alarm clock app (the Timely). Usually I try to minimize 3rd party add-ons, but I could not live with unreliable alarm. Timely was working fine, which only proved my point the native alarm clock was broken in KitKat (I even got proofs of that on several Internet forums).

While it was working perfectly fine.

The reason for the alarm not sounding was the so called Blocking Mode I use on my phone. It silences all the incoming calls (except the allowed white list) and all sorts of notifications from emails, messages and other events. Yes I like to sleep undisturbed and the Blocking Mode is one of my favorite phone functions. There is a setting in the Blocking Mode to allow the Alarm to go through or not. In my case it was actively blocking the alarms set before 6AM. This setting was unchecked in my Galaxy Note II and I never checked it in the Note 3. So it must be a default that is not synchronized with the Google Cloud. And I even forgot there was such setting in the first place.

Now it is unchecked and my alarms work as expected. But the frustration remains. The systems and devices we use are getting extremely complicated and throughout their lives we keep on adjusting them to our needs, or ourselves to the way they behave. And the last thing anybody wants is when the behavior changes unexpectedly at an event like a device (or software) upgrade.

Lesson noted and I really do hope we don't make such mistakes in the systems we provide to our customers. I learned the hard way how frustrating this can be.