Android: Clock Showing Upcoming Non-Existent Alarm

Since my last Android upgrade, this has bugged me a lot: my clock always showed an alarm that was due at 8pm every day. BUt there was no such alarm.

Clearing the clock's data did not help at all.

After restarting the phone, the alarm did not show - until a few minutes had gone by. So I assumed that it was a service that created its own alarm when started.

I went through all my apps, killing them one by one, until the clock showed no alarm any more. Alas, it took me a loooong time to find the culprit: apps are sorted alphabetically, and the app that was causing this is Tasker with a "T" 😉.

I had a task defined that would trigger at 8pm, and Taker uses am alarm to get the trigger working. Makes sense.

Showing upcoming alarms as part of the clock seems to be a feature added in Android 10.

I ended up turning off "reliable alarms", in which case Tasker does not create such an alarm. I am not sure how it achieves the goal otherwise, but I know that alarms can be less reliable (as the name of the option indicates), but I do not care about a few minutes here. It also means that it will be easier for Android to kill Taker entirely when it feels like it. That is something that remains to be seen - still testing.

Anyway, the nagging upcoming alarm is gone. It did not do any harm, but it bugged me each time I turned on my phone, so there 😀

I hope this saves someone else the time I had to spend looking for the app that cause this non-issue.