[nknealk]

All I want for Christmas is the ability to set multiple timers on my iPhone.

[CaptainZapp]

Can you seriously not do that?

There's a lot of shit I don't appreciate about Android, but setting as many timers as you want is a total no-brainer.

[ceejayoz]

It’s been so long either they’re too embarrassed to add the feature after all these years or there’s some weird deeply embedded technical obstacle too scary to touch.

[happytoexplain]

I guarantee it's a third option: When Apple has a bizarre, unexplainable limitation, it's because of a highly opinionated hyper-pure UX design decision.

Having multiple timers running is inelegant and sometimes confusing. So instead of giving users any agency in that situation, they just ban the very concept as a whole.

If they feel enough pressure, and they can come up with a satisfactorily simple UX, they will usually eventually fix the hole.

[suchire]

Hilariously, you can set multiple timers on the Apple Watch, where screen real estate and battery are even more constrained.

[jakear]

Not ideal, but fairly easy to hand roll this with the new web push notification support. I support it as a component of a site I'm working on.

The main annoying part is iOS PWA's kill their service workers when off screen even when explicitly told not to via the `waitUntil` command, so you need to have a server running which handles keeping track of the ongoing timeouts and calls the push notification endpoints accordingly.

Code for that is here, https://github.com/JacksonKearl/push-simple. There's a Dockerfile, currently deployed via fly.io.

[layer8]

Timers requiring a connection to the internet are a non-starter IMO.

[CaptainZapp]

I'd wager that this solution is definitely not in the "just works" department.

[jrflowers]

“Siri, remind me to check noodles (or whatever) in ten minutes” works when you’ve got another timer going.

[1_1xdev1]

Similarly “wake me up in 12 minutes”. But you get alarms instead of “timers”