iPhone users 'disturbed' after discovering shocking design element hidden in plain sight

iPhones are known for their spectacular yet simple design, with each new iOS version offering fresh innovations for you to spot, yet one recent design element discovery has left people 'disturbed' as they work out the truth behind one of the phone's most used apps.

Many people opt for iPhones purely because of the design, as while Android has certainly improved over the years in that department, Apple's flagship device has remained the choice for many when it comes to visuals.

That appears to only be continuing with the impending launch of iOS 26, as it's 'Liquid Glass' visual overhaul is the biggest refresh in years and aims to emulate the translucent feel of augmented reality headsets like Apple's own Vision Pro.

It is that expectation of sleek and seamless design that's left so many shocked though when a viral post on X revealed a 'disturbing' feature in the iPhone's Clock app, as a subtle feature has been used to trick every single user.

What has left iPhone users feeling 'disturbed'?

As reported by the Daily Mail, curious iPhone owners have been left shocked when X user @skydotcs revealed that the alarm function in the device's Clock app actually has an end point, as opposed to being a recurring loop.

"The time picked on iPhone's alarm app isn't actually circular it's just a really long list," they revealed, accompanying the post with a video that showed this time picked reaching an end point of 4:29 PM.

While this might not seem like a staggering revelation at first, it does break the fourth wall of sorts by showing how software is able to deceive you into thinking it works differently — much like videos that show game developers use camera angles to obscure the player.

Most people would have thought that this otherwise simple time selector would be a constantly rotating pool of 12 and 59 numbers respectively, whereas it's instead an incredibly long list of the same numbers over and over again until it does indeed reach an end.

"What the f***" was a common response shared by many people in the replies, whereas other have joked that "you just made me scroll through the hour selector for 5 minutes. You're a bad person."

Understandable, others have asked why Apple has decided to opt for this instead of a single circular linked list, wondering that it "can't be that hard." In response, Sky proposed: "If it's not that hard surely it would've been done that way, right."

Often that's the way things are when it comes to software development, where those behind the products do things in convoluted ways at first glace, but they provide a solution that would be impossible – or at the least, very difficult – to achieve in the way that you'd expect.