Learn how to replace the ‘slide to stop’ action for turning off alarms and timers on your iPhone with the one-tap ‘Stop’ button for simplicity.
iOS 26 defaults to a more deliberate ‘slide to stop’ action for turning off alarms and timers, which is obviously not as straightforward as a tappable stop button. This small change ensures you don’t disable your Monday alarm accidentally and then oversleep. Even if you interact with your iPhone half asleep, at most you’ll tap the big orange snooze button, and then get reminded to wake up again after about 9 minutes.
While practical for most people, if you think otherwise and would prefer to stop alarms and timers with just a single tap instead of a slide motion, iOS 26 has a hidden toggle to do that.
Stop iPhone alarm and timer with a tap
- Make sure your iPhone or iPad is running the latest version of iOS 26 or iPadOS 26.
- Open the Settings app and tap Accessibility.
- Tap Touch.
- Scroll to the bottom and turn on Prefer Single-Touch Actions.
From now on, when alarms and timers go off on your iPhone or iPad, you can just tap the big stop button instead of doing a long slide gesture.
Note that the left-to-right ‘slide to stop’ action is not completely new. The original iPhone, running iPhone OS 1.0, up to devices running iOS 9, had a slide-to-unlock gesture to go past the Lock Screen onto the Home Screen. People loved it and even used the SlideToUnlockX jailbreak tweak on iOS 10 to restore this feature.
Extra info: If you turn off the Snooze feature, you can stop the iPhone alarm by pressing any physical button (i.e., the side power button, volume button, or the Action button).
Also, check out: 18 settings to change and new features to try in iOS 26